20-23 October 2022

Pygmalion Art Gallery’s first participation at Asia NOW Paris is devoted to the work of Kazakh painter Yerbolat Tolepbay (b.1955) whose art is an exploration of the inner self in all its emotional, physical, and spiritual dimensions. Including historical works, this presentation re-introduces the vibrant artistic production of one of the most important and prolific artists of Central Asia, whose ongoing practice is going on five decades, thousands of works, and thirty-five countries of exhibitions. Until this year, Tolepbay only engaged with museums and institutions—no commercial platforms—and always for solo exhibitions exclusively. His last such presentation in France was at UNESCO's Headquarters in Paris in 2005, following which the French Ministry of Culture awarded him the title of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Contemporary fine arts as a discipline, but also as an industry, is very young in Kazakhstan, nearing one hundred years only. With its professionalization and further opening to the international artistic community, we are now lucky to have the opportunity to show Tolepbay’s oeuvre to a larger audience and art thinkers.

In the USSR, the artist had achieved notoriety by the time he was twenty-seven-year-old, when his large oil painting “Artist’s Youth” (1983)—a classical composition blending figuration and elements of abstraction, centered on a realistic figure of a child looking through an open door flanked by the artist as an adult, his wife, and Rembrandt—took first place in the then prestigious Moscow pan-Soviet art competition. Notably, this painting already bore the mark of the symbolic constants in Tolepbay’s painterly language: classical triangular figurative compositions and abstraction; surrealist undertones; the open door, a pictorial leitmotif in lieu of reality and time-shifting passage leading to vivid skies; and a tender focus on daily and domestic scenes as the foundation of human relationships.

Tolepbay grew up in the enigmatic and isolated Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, a vast oil-rich territory lying along the Silk Road, at the geopolitical and cultural crossroads between China and Russia. The latter, its colonizer since the 18th century, held on tight to this territory of dust-blown grasslands and glorious mountains throughout the Russian Empire and into Soviet power, imposing its administrative subjugation and cultivating the region as an industrial playground, test zone for USSR’s nuclear armaments, and cold war Space Race infrastructure.