Georgy Guryanov

Biography

On 12 May 1993 Georgy Guryanov’s first solo exhibition opened in the Marble Palace, a branch of the Russian Museum. Three years earlier he had been known for something else entirely: he was Kino’s drummer, and he played his kit standing up, a manner he had borrowed from Western New Romantic bands.

In the band he was called Gustav.

He was born on 27 February 1961 in Leningrad, into a family of geologists. Before he even started school he attended a music club at the Kozitsky Palace of Culture and learned the balalaika, domra, piano and guitar. In 1975 he finished City Art School No. 1, and in 1976 he entered the Serov Leningrad Art School, but left a year later: the academic system did not suit him. It is a curious thing that some twelve years later he would be among those who proclaimed themselves the new academists. In the late 1970s he played bass guitar in Sergei “Sam” Semyonov’s band, and in 1983 he was briefly a member of the punk group Automatic Satisfiers.

He met Timur Novikov in 1979, and in 1982, together with Viktor Tsoi, he became one of the first members of Novikov’s group the New Artists; their first action, “Zero Object”, took place on 12 October 1982. After Aleksei Rybin left Kino, Tsoi and Guryanov decided to play together and, with the guitarist Yuri Kasparyan, formed the core of the renewed band. From 1984 Guryanov was its permanent drummer, arranger and backing vocalist, and he was largely responsible for how Kino looked on stage. The black shirts and suits were made by the designer Konstantin Goncharov; as Guryanov recalled, Goncharov cut practically to his own slight figure, and on the sturdily built drummer the clothes split at the seams. From 1985 he and Tsoi were listed as artists of the Leningrad Rock Club, and at the same time he began playing and singing in Sergei Kuryokhin’s orchestra Pop-Mechanics. In summer, while his parents were away on expeditions, the family flat in Kupchino turned into a rehearsal base: the Kino musicians lived there, and Sergei “Afrika” Bugaev and the duo New Composers came by. In 1987 the album “Blood Type” was recorded in that flat on a portable studio.

Kino played until Tsoi’s death in August 1990; according to Guryanov, the band was then preparing to go to Tokyo. By that time he was already absorbed in clubs, techno and house. He was among the organisers of the first Russian raves, in the Kosmos pavilion at VDNKh and at the Krylatskoye velodrome, and drew the posters for them himself. After 1990 he did no more music.

In December 1989 Guryanov joined the circle of Neo-Academism proclaimed by Novikov. In July 1990 an exhibition organised by the artist Ivan Movsesyan was held on the span of the Palace Bridge, and his monumental canvas hung at the centre of it. In 1991 Guryanov, Novikov, Denis Egelsky and Goncharov showed “Academism and Neo-Academism” in the Marble Palace, which at the time still housed a branch of the Central Lenin Museum; at the second exhibition on the bridge he showed the panel “The Fighters”. In 1993 the circle took shape as the New Academy of Fine Arts, and Guryanov, together with Novikov, Egelsky, Vladislav Tuzov and Andrei Medvedev, received the title of honorary professor. Contemporaries saw it as a game of playing at a new officialdom.

From 1991 until the end of his life his main subject was sport. Muscular young men in close-fitting kit or stripped to the waist, sailors, pilots, rowers, boxers, tractor drivers: such are “Boxers” and “Give Us a Goal!” (both 1991), the triptych “A Severe Young Man” (1994), “Rowers” (1998–2000), “Aviator” (1999), “Woman Tractor Driver” (2002) and “Springboard” (2006). He drew on Soviet sports photography, on Alexander Rodchenko’s photographs, on Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia” and on Abram Room’s film “A Severe Young Man”; many of the figures come close to self-portraits. The art historian Ekaterina Andreeva wrote that within Neo-Academism he was the first to take up taboo totalitarian iconography in earnest, without the protective irony of Sots Art. To my mind this is an accurate observation: his athletes come from the poster world of the thirties, but there is no slogan beside them, only the body and its bearing.

Then came the exhibitions “Renaissance and Resistance” at the Russian Museum (1994), the solo show “Willpower” at the Regina Gallery in Moscow, curated by Novikov (1994), a showing at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1997), and solo exhibitions at the D-137 gallery in St Petersburg in 2001, 2003 and 2004. At the exhibition “New Academy. St Petersburg” at the Ekaterina Foundation in Moscow (2011–2012, curated by Arkady Ippolitov) his works formed the core of the display.

His friends called him “the conscience of Petersburg style”.

From 1986 he appeared as himself in Kino’s music videos and in the films “Ya-Hha”, “End of Holiday”, “Rok” and “Assa”; he hosted the sports programme “Spartacus” on Pirate Television, and in Olga Tobreluts’s 1998 film he played Mayakovsky. In his last years he no longer lived in Kupchino but in the centre, on Liteyny Prospekt.

Georgy Guryanov died on 20 July 2013 in his flat on Liteyny. His funeral service was held on 25 July in the St Nicholas Naval Cathedral, and he was buried in the Smolensky Cemetery. In 2017 Metsur Volde’s book “Georgy Guryanov: I Am Art” came out, and in 2022 Ippolitov’s monograph “Georgy Guryanov: The Last Dandy of Petersburg”. On 27 February 2026, his sixty-fifth birthday, a museum opened in the flat on Liteyny where he had lived for the last thirteen years; among the exhibits is Kino’s drum kit.