LONDON.- The Aktis gallery is a new gallery that will open on 14th April in St. James’s, London, where it will focus on Russian artists who have worked in exile since 1900. For the opening, directors, Iana Kobeleva and Anna Chalova, will exhibit previously unseen drawings by non-conformist Russian artist Vladimir Yankilevsky. Represented in museums and important private collections in Russia, America, France and Germany, the artist’s distinctive draughtsmanship will be shown within the context of his more substantial triptychs and oils. His drawings have seldom been offered for sale before.

Yankilevsky spoke publicly this month of how, as an artist in Moscow in the 1960’s who did not conform to standards set by the Russian Ministry of Culture, he was forced to search the streets late at night to find materials on which to work. Prior to 1978 his large triptychs were still unassembled due to lack of approval and physical space and, yet, turning to his drawings from this period we can see a formidable natural talent developing free of such restrictions.

“By nature” Yankilevsky says, “my emotion is linked to the top of the pencil. It is like a cohesive mechanism. And in strictly physiological terms, a ‘good eye’ is not the same as talent. I have a sharp eye for proportions. I catch the gist and what’s distinctive about someone.” But at The Moscow Middle Art School at the Surikov Institute of the USSR Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied from 1958-62, he created works which were “…quite different from what the teachers wanted from me. I was not interested in drawing the shadow of a nose, for example, because I was drawing not the shadow but the nose. And I would go to such extremes as drawing only what I felt: for instance, the leg that was tense. The second leg that was relaxed did not exist, and I did not draw it at all.”