Oleg Timchenko is a Tbilisi-based contemporary painter and founder of the "10th Floor Group". He was born in Old Tbilisi and studied painting at the Tbilisi Academy of Fine Arts.
Background
In 1917, shortly after the Russian Revolution, the family of Oleg Timchenko's mother fled to Georgia to escape repressions due to the noble origins of their family.
The artist's grandfather was the painter Evgenyi Gulitskii. Gulitskii was a businessman aiding the first Russian aviators and various progressive technologically advanced projects.
Oleg Timchenko's father, Ivan Timchenko, was also a painter. Originally from Vitebsk, Belarus, Ivan Timchenko was working in Caucasus, where he met Oleg's mother.
Timchenko's brother, Konstantine, worked in a royal chancellery of the Emperor Nicholas II.
Oleg Timchenko's ancestors migrated to Georgia from St Petersburg and Vitebsk. For this reason "migration" is the artist’s fate determined by physical resettlement of his ancestors and embodied in his art. His paintings are imitation of "migration" to various countries, epochs, space and cultural layers, through his personal or genetic memory.
Career
From 1987–1991, Oleg worked as a painter in the Marjanishvili Theater. During this time, Timchenko and his friends created the theater group called "10th Floor Group", which was composed of Georgian Happening artists.
Several Years later he established another artist group called "Marjanishvili".
Art
His early works of the 1980s are noted with an ascetic expressionism and were gradually replaced by firework expression determined by intensity of color and stroke. Timchenko follows these two trends from the very beginning, but with time the margin between them becomes more obvious.
Migration plays a part in the Timchenko’s work representing various countries, epochs, space and cultural layers, through his personal or genetic memory.
In general, Timchenko is interested in characters – whether it is Ophelia, the Sphinx, Infantas, Pontius Pilate, or a dwarf, – and is said to be an empathetic participant of the story rather than a distant story-teller. He makes his characters and attributes in the images of people, animals, toys, plants, and objects that eventually turn into the models of his art and then he makes up new stories about each of them.
He has been considered a “transformer” artist whose art is a means of transformation. Timchenko's works often create a whole set of contrasting characters – sad angels, tragic dancing gnomes, wonder-struck forest ghosts with childish and non-childish expressions, often decorated with roses, precious stones, and jewelry. Timchenko often employs invention in this process of transformation: Infantas make friends with “dolls”, princes with leopards, Ali Baba with a crane, a toy horse with a childish and naïve expression gallops from one picture to another.
Perhaps his most noted work, "Ophelia" (1996) was born from the idea of creating a projection in waters. The themes surrounding Ophelia have a close link to all of Timchenko's work. For him she embodies the paradox of "beauty" and "transitoriness". Timchenko: "I paint neither trees nor leaves. I paint the wind touching the leaves" — in this case the water touching Ophelia.
Timchenko realized a more literal version of this idea in 1998 in Prague, where he installed a projector at the Charles Bridge and a canvas of 8 x 3 metres beneath the surface of the Vltava river. After a subsequent exhibition in Bratislava, he installed a projector over an aquarium of the original size of the painting 1999 in Paris.
Oleg Timchenko is a “reactionary” artist and his reaction is compassion. He loves the world, is interested in and suffers from the “pain” of the latter. His personal feelings are transformed into eternal topics. He touches on the themes involving a drama, strong emotions: love, death, beauty, psycho-somatic difference, risk, fear, pain. He is a bit grotesque, expressive, expressly childish, but not naïve. He rather has a nostalgic approach of an adult toward childhood, having a desire to play and a priority to detect beauty in every happening.