Boris Alexandrovich Kudryakov (1946-2005) was a photographer, an artist, a writer, a poet, a playwright. He is rightfully considered to be the father of post-Stalinist independent photography in Leningrad, the follower of Gogol's and Dostoyevsky’s style. His works are characterized by gloomy irony, absurdity logic, transformation of the text into graphics.
Boris Kudryakov was born on May 28, 1946 in Leningrad. He started to take photos in 1956. Since 1968 he attended photo classes at Vyborgsky House of Culture. Joined “Malaya Sadovaya” literary circle, where he got to know Konstantin Kuzminsky and other underground poets and writers. It was Kuzminsky who started to call Kudryakov “Grand” Boris and Smelov “Petit” Boris in order to distinguish the two namesakes.
Since 1968 Grand Boris became an active member of independent culture, and at Kuzminsky’s request started to take pictures of Leningrad underground artists and writers, to multiply photocopies of samizdat, and to photograph materials, which later formed a multivolume anthology of the most recent Russian poetry “At the Blue Lagoon”. At the same time he painted landscapes, still-lives, went into genre photography. By that time he’d already become a fully formed photographer with his own subjects and style.
From the beginning of 1970-s Boris Kudryakov started to write novels and stories that were published in independent miscellanies and magazines, such as “Clock”, “Obvodny Canal”, “Transponans”, “At the Blue Lagoon”, and others.
Boris Kudryakov’s painting is a completely unknown part of his creative life. For the first time his pictures were shown in Borey gallery at the exhibition dedicated to the memory of the artist. That exhibition (Boris Kudryakov. “NATIVE GROUNDS”. B/w photography, texts, painting. October 31-November 11, 2006) presented various directions of the author’s art. This time we invite you to the first show of Boris Kudryakov’s paintings only. |
