Paintings by Georgy Gurianov
Born in 1961 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Georgy Gurianov was a musician, photographer and artist. Musically, he is best known as the drummer for Russia’s seminal rock band “Kino”. Gurianov studied at the V.A. Serov Leningrad Art School and became a founding member, along with visual artist Timur Novikov, of the Novye Khudozhniki, the New Artists movement. He also contributed to the concerts of composer and experimental artist Sergei Kuryokhin and his band, Ensemble Pop-Mekhanika.
Through the 1980s, Gurianov painted neo-expressionist works, Including many posters for the first raves in Russia, a part of the New Artists movement.
During the 1990s, Gurianov continued to be involved with music and art, serving as a founding member and honorary professor at Timor Novikov’s New Academy of Fine Arts which initiated a return to Classicism, celebrating the ideals of beauty and physical perfection. The Academy was also politically charged with its deliberate insertion of sexual ambiguity and homoeroticism in their works.
Georgy Gurianov, at this time, was producing drawings and paintings of athletes, sailors, and soldiers, influenced by the Soviet Realist style of painter and graphic artist Aleksandr Deyneka. Private about his own sexual orientation, his paintings were quite explicit representing homosocial situations, particularly those aboard ships. Gurianov often painted the features of his friends, and himself, onto the characters in his tableaux, as seen in his 2000 “Argo” where he is standing at the helm.
Solo exhibitions of Georgy Gurianov’s work were held at the Marble Palace of the State Russian Museum in 1993, Moscow’s Regina Gallery in 1994, Gallery D-137 located in St. Petersburg in 2001, and Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 1997.
A cult figure of the 1980s St. Petersburg underground movement, Georgy Gurianov died on July 20, 2013 in St. Petersburg at the age of fifty-two. His work is in many private collections worldwide.