Yuri Kokoyanin
( 1948 - now)
is a Russian Postwar & Contemporary painter who was born in 1948.
Born in Leningrad in 1948, was a well-recognized artist in the U.S.S.R.
He emigrated to the U.S. in the late 70s and has been living, painting and exhibiting in the Washington DC, area, USA. Quote from the exhibition catalogue by written by Frank Getlein: " Yuri Kokoyanin, a St. Petersburg native now resident in Washington, is an unabashed painter in a time when most American art, long past the strict orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism and even of its one accepted heterodoxy, Pop Apt, seems becalmed in the search for novelty.
The Russian immigrant pursues his own vision as if neither American abstraction nor, even more emphatically, the Soviet Socialist Realism that flourished in his childhood in Russia, had ever existed. For Kokoyanin, the figure in figurative art is the nude figure and the nude in art have always presented problems, most of them stemming from the Christian Puritan heritage of Europe and America. In this as in other ways, the Soviet Union was the last Puritan State in Europe, regarding the nude in art as too powerful a distraction from more proper thoughts about the virtues of Socialism"
A NOTE ON THE WORK OF YURI KOKOYANIN by Henry Orlov.
"Rarely one encounters an artist who seems to be driven, if not obsessed, with so few distinct features as one finds in the works by Yuri Kokoyanin.
Images of an old city's nondescript buildings, or ruins that hint at Antiquity and nude women's figures constantly haunt his artistic vision.
The relief obtained by either pressing the paper in his etchings or by incorporating three-dimensional details in his oil is his stylistic signature. Inseparable in most of his works, these features may suggest that some higher plane they are intimately related, perhaps even indispensable to each other."
Yuri Kokoyanin's work has been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices ranging from 300 USD to 1,650 USD, depending on the size and medium of the artwork. Since 2016 the record price for this artist at auction is 1,650 USD for In the Studio, sold at Palácio do Correio Velho in 2016.