Abstract still lifes built from playing cards made him one of the leading figures of Soviet nonconformism. In 1974, he took part in the legendary Bulldozer Exhibition.
In 1943, while working at a precision-instruments plant, eighteen-year-old Vladimir Nemukhin met Pyotr Sokolov, a former assistant to Kazimir Malevich. The meeting shaped the rest of his life: Sokolov opened a window onto the world of the avant-garde, something almost no one in Stalinist Moscow knew still existed. Nemukhin graduated from the studio school of the Soviet trade union council in 1946, and from 1956 he grew close to Oskar Rabin and the circle of artists and poets who gathered at Rabin's barrack home in the settlement of Lianozovo outside Moscow. That gathering gave its name to an entire movement: the Lianozovo group.
A turning point came in 1958, when an exhibition of American art featuring Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning was shown in Moscow. A year later Nemukhin painted his first abstract work, and he remained an abstractionist for life, refusing Socialist Realism as the only permitted method.
Playing cards became Nemukhin's signature motif: fragments of card tables, scattered decks, fighting cocks. As scholar Julia Tulovsky has written, these images speak of chance, intrigue, and indeterminacy – exactly what the Soviet system could not tolerate, demanding predictability and obedience from its artists instead.
In September 1974, Nemukhin took part in an open-air exhibition on a vacant lot in Belyaevo that went down in history as the Bulldozer Exhibition: authorities broke it up with bulldozers and trucks loaded with saplings, and the artists' works were destroyed. The scandal made headlines around the world and forced the authorities to back down – within two weeks, nonconformist artists were allowed an official exhibition in Izmailovo Park. Nemukhin later lived in Düsseldorf before returning to Moscow, and in 2008 became an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts. His work is held by the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, MoMA, and the Stedelijk Museum.
