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biography
Andrej Lanskoy, the son of Comte Lanskoy, was born the 31st March 1902 in Moscow. After the revolutionary turmoil of 1905 the family moved to St. Petersburg, the capital in 1909. In the same year Lanskoy develops a strong interest in Poetry and started to write. In 1918 He moved to Kiew where he paints his first watercolours. During the civil war he fought in the Tsarist White Army. After an injury he first moves to Constantinople and in 1921 to Paris. In the same year Serge Poliakoff reached Paris and Nicolas de Staël followed in 1937. Lanskoy started to paint immediately: “Literally in the first night I started to paint and I haven’t stopped since.” He spent a lot of time at museums and was heavily influenced by Ensor’s and Van Gogh’s use of colour. In 1923 he participated in first group exhibitions of Russian painters at the La Licorne Gallery in Paris. Wilhelm Uhde discovered Lanskoy’s painting “La Noce” at the Salon d’Automne in 1924 and he acquired almost all Lanskoy paintings in the following years. In 1925 the Bing Gallery in Paris held a solo exhibition and his works were acquired by museums and important private collectors (Fénéon, Armand Parrent, Dutileul). From 1925 to 1940 Dutilleul was his most important collector. From 1937 onwards he bagan his transition towards abstraction and studied Klee and Kandinsky. From 1942 onwards he only painted abstract works. The interaction of form and colour, the subjectivity of the painter and the objective finished work became the major theme running through his oevre: “Even though every brushstroke represents for itself a transformed reality, it receives its true meaning in the context of surrounding shades of colour”. In 1944 Lanskoy exhibited at the Jean Bucher Gallery in Paris where he met Nicolas de Staël (for the much younger artist he is “Père Lanskoy”). In 1948 the artist showed at the Louis Carré Gallery and in 1951 at the Dubourg Gallery. The Tooth and Sons Gallery showed his work in 1953 and The Loeb Gallery in New York followed in 1959. In 1962 he began to work on a large project of original prints and collages to accompany Gogol’s novel “Diary of a Madman”. He worked on this monumental project for fourteen years up to his death resulting in one hundred and fifty collages and eighty lithographs. In 1966 he had a personal exhibition at the Museé Galliéra, Paris. The Neue Galerie in Zürich held a personal exhibition in 1969. Lanskoy died on the 24th of August in Paris. Aras Gallery collected the extensive “Diary of a Madman” series of prints and staged a major posthumous exhibition in 1989.
exhibitions
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