Marat Bekeev

Marat Bekeev (born in 1964) is one of the most outstanding painters
among the new wave of post-Soviet artists. He studied painting and
sculpture at the Academy of Arts in Minsk in 1984-89. In the Soviet Union,
there was a strong emphasis on technical mastery in the education in the
visual arts. A painter was assumed to be a skilled artisan, firmly rooted to
the tradition of socialist realism, with the mission of giving a visual
expression to the aspirations of the socialist society and the daily life of its
citizens. As regards the superb mastery of several different techniques,
Marat Bekeev has indeed lived up to the Soviet ideal of the painter as an
artisan and a master of his trade.

The second half of 1980s was a period of drastic re-orientation in the
Soviet and Russian art. Before the new freedom of expression brought
about by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, avant-garde art
was more or less confined to the underground, accessible only to a very
narrow circle of intellectuals in the major cities. In 1980s this all changed:
contemporary painting was freed of its marginal status and was able to
challenge the old mainstream. The foundations of Marat Bekeev’s painting
were laid in this atmosphere of iconoclasm and enthusiasm, amidst a
general feeling of excitement over the newly acquired powers of self-
expression. The ideal was still that of the skilled artisan, but instead of the
socialist realism that emphasised continuity, the work was now influenced
by Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, Nicholas de Staël, and Francis
Bacon.

This synthesis between traditions developed into a striking versatility in the
mature work of Bekeev. The mastery of several techniques deepens this
sense of versatility. In this Brussels exhibition, three different sides of his
art are portrayed. The first one is the exquisite play with shades of colour
in the oil-on-canvas paintings. Second, the powerful and haunting images
created with oil pastels on paper reveal a different aesthetic landscape that
is in stark contrast with the warm and harmonic compositions of the oil
paintings. The works created with gouache, acrylic paint and water colour
on paper concentrate, in turn, on play with a set of basic symbols to
produce an endless variety of compositions.

Although Bekeev denies any influence of Chagall, there is indeed
something Chagallesque in his work. Like Chagall, he fetches a set of
basic images from the environment of his childhood as recurring basic
elements for his compositions. And like Chagall, he usually denies the
symbolic value of these basic images, referring to them as mere building
blocks that are put together to create a whole that is more than a sum of its
parts. Nevertheless, in the same manner as the works of Chagall create a
vivid impression of the Jewish Vitebsk of bygone days, the paintings of
Bekeev – playing with the images of the falcon, the horseman, the moon,
the starry night that embraces the artist – portray the feel of his native
steppe town of Aktyubinsk. In a delightful cycle of small oil paintings, he
also pays an explicit tribute to the life on the steppe and the childhood
images that have evolved into the basic constituents of his art.

Marat Bekeev lives and works currently in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Besides in
his native country, his work has been on display in Moscow, St. Petersburg,
Paris and Berlin. Several of his paintings are in the permanent collection of
the National Gallery of Art of Kazakhstan.

To see works by Marat Bekeev, please click here.