Rinat Voligamsi

Biography

The surname Voligamsi does not need to be looked up in passports: it is Ismagilov read from right to left. Under this pseudonym Rinat Fazletdinovich Ismagilov became known.

He was born on 6 March 1968 in the village of Yermolaevo in the Bashkir ASSR. He drew from childhood. In 1984 he entered the Ufa Petroleum Institute (now Ufa State Petroleum Technological University), in the faculty of architecture and civil engineering, where one of his teachers was an architect named Melnikov. In 1988 he was conscripted into the army, but a year later he was released to finish his studies; he received his diploma in architecture in 1989. He later named his army impressions as one source of his subjects.

In 1995, when he was twenty-seven, his name appears among the winners of the State Prize of the Russian Federation in literature and the arts for 1994. Since 2000 he has been a member of the Russian Union of Artists. His first solo exhibitions took place in Zlatoust (1995) and Ufa (1999), then in Moscow: at the Miras gallery (2000) and at the Central House of Artists, a large exhibition hall in Moscow (2001). In 2002 the Amadeus Art gallery in London showed his work.

His method is unusual. He selects photographs on the theme of a future work, studies them, puts them away and paints from memory. His source material is old Soviet newspapers and photographs. For that reason his pictures hover between photorealism and surrealism: a recognisable surface in which something has been shifted. He calls the Soviet world he grew up in fundamental to his work, but leaves the meaning of what he says to the viewer. He describes his painting as funny and resting on a precarious balance between “rationality and utter insanity”; among his influences he names British punk.

His best-known cycle, “Unofficial Album” (around 2006), is built as a fictional history of Vladimir Lenin. Here Lenin has a twin brother, Sergei, who survives 1924, abandons politics and lives as a Muslim. The cycle was shown in Ufa (2008), Perm (2011) and Krasnoyarsk (2016).

In 2007 the exhibition “People. Conversations. Flies” was held at the Central House of Artists, and in 2008 there was another solo show in Moscow, at Ravenscourt Galleries. Since 2011 he has worked with the 11.12 GALLERY in Moscow, on the grounds of the Winzavod contemporary art centre. In the same year the Erarta gallery in London showed the series “The Conditions of Winter”, about soldiers in the Russian winter. The cycle “Snow” (2011–2013) was exhibited at 11.12 GALLERY in 2013, and “The Village” there in 2016.

In 2014 he received the Repin Prize and was nominated for the Kandinsky Prize. In 2017 he entered the Russian investment art ranking 49ART, which brings together contemporary artists under fifty. At that time or a little later came the cycle “Dvoegorsk” (2018), about a fictional town of that name.

Voligamsi’s works are in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the State Russian Museum, the Erarta museum in St Petersburg, the Vrubel Museum in Omsk, the Krasnoyarsk Museum Centre, ROSPHOTO, the Nesterov Bashkir Art Museum in Ufa, and also in the White Rabbit Collection in Australia, the Redbase Foundation in Indonesia and the Fondation Francès in France. He lives and works in Ufa.