Press Release

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 on-going 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 the UNESCO's Headquarters in Paris in 2005, following which the French Ministry of Culture awarded him with the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in the grade of Chevalier. Contemporary fine arts as a discipline, but also as an industry, is very young in Kazakhstan, nearing one hundred years only. With its professionalisation 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-sevenyear-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 a 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.

The youngest of six children, Tolepbay was born in the house of a non-traditional healer in a small village in the south. People would travel from near and far to see his mother who, as the story goes, received her gift when she was thirteen-year-old. Tolepbay’s childhood was spent observing men and women from all walks of life coming to his home: “As long as I can remember, people were already queuing to see my mother when I would open my eyes in the morning, and they were still there when I was going to bed.”

His formative years were spent witnessing first-hand the non-rational events of shamanic practices, the trances, the messages delivered, and clairvoyant insights his shaman-mum was imparting day-to-day; and most importantly—the resulting healings. As he grew up, and his artistic practice developed, his tending to the mystical awe that caring closely about humans inspires—never stopped. Merging humanity with the divine and translating it over the years at the tip of his knives and brushes, grew to inhabit him as a powerful calling.

During the decolonization process, Tolepbay shared with his peers the will to break free from Moscow’s authority, showing a bravery that is largely recognized as inspirational for many artists of his generation and the next. In his early career, his approach was largely inspired by old masters and concepts grasped from the handful of books available in Soviet Kazakhstan. But pre-independence, his style transitioned along the changes brewing towards the country’s self-determination, to painterly societal critiques foreseeing the coming of capitalism and its materialistic rule. For instance, in his 1980 oil on canvas “Abundance,” painted more than ten years before the end of the USSR, Tolepbay center-stages a potbellied character, proudly standing inside a door frame and showing off his car—as a sarcastic warning towards rampant consumerist behaviors to come. As history showed, the brutal transition to the Western system didn’t prevent the Kazakh emerging nation to inherit chaos, corruption and desolation in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

Collection of the National Museum of Kazakhstan It is this insight into the feeling of loss and loneliness of the soul—in the context of the young nation’s continuous erosion of cultural heritage and frame of references by successive waves of Russian imperialism, communist colonialism, and economical uncertainties—that pushed Tolepbay’s practice to make a radical turn in the years after Kazakh independence, and until the present days. The artist took refuge in the spirituality and philosophy of the Kazakh people, and harnessed elements of a pictorial language based on his inner world, the nomadic spirit of the Eurasian steppes, folk shamanism, and animism. Art can be a beacon of light, like a healing practice. Tolepbay uses with masterful technique—shifting from realistic figuration to blurred soft lines and drawing from a groundingpeace and art’s potential to guide us through loss and grief—to lead us through material riches into spiritual ones. Evidencing his transitional period is his 1991 painting “He and She,” where two faceless figures lie next to each other against an ominous dark background. They are already connected in the shadows by a clear smear of white paint, linking the couple energetically and spiritually like a hopeful light between the cracks of overwhelming circumstances.

His latest work is a response to this “appeal to the inner world,” featuring elements of his beloved steps and traditional cultural heritage, which grows brighter and more cheerful in color, carving its own singular language against the grain of the current contemporary artistic scene of Kazakhstan. His open doors are still there, but they are attached to yurts for over 20 years now. The yurt—the epitome of Kazakh culture, which also means homeland or nation—represents the traditional dwelling of nomadic life, the sanctuary-home between steppes and sky, easily displaced yet somehow able to ground itself between several realities, timelines, and spaces. In the painting, “Three Steppe Graces,” the title’s accolade to world art history invites the viewer to reconsider the reference by observing three young women on camels’ backs, softly chatting while their animals pasture away. The characters he depicts evoke the absolute and pure qualities of
human connection when it’s in a state of being, nearly meditative, in harmony with nature.

Here in “The Bright Day,” two mothers sit peacefully with their infants, or here in “The Light From The Sky,” two women, one napping, one seated on her heels, are bathed in a soft sunlight coming from an opening in the colorful yurt.

“I see colour as a vibration, like the pulsating of the heart,” says the artist about the
radiant mood of his steppes paintings. This latest series by calling up on an ideal,
embodies the essence of the human soul, when that soul manifests itself as benevolent,
well-balanced, and in tune with the cosmos. Like poetry, Tolepbay’s artistic language
might be esoteric, but similarly to poetry, his use of universal human emotions is a vehicle
that can touch every heart.

The Light from the Sky, 2017
Oil on Canvas
140 x 170cm