Biography
Vladimir P. Feoktistov was born in 1947 in North Caucasus, Russia. In 1956, Khrushchev repealed Stalin's deportation orders for Chechens. When deportees returned home and found their land occupied by newcomers, they vowed revenge. Blood was spilled and houses of Russians were burned. Growing up, Vladimir observed the conflicts between Russians and Chechens resolved by daggers and blood, and reflected on that in his later works.
In 1966, Feoktistov entered the Moscow Academy of Art, where he became a student of Favorskiy and Filonov. He continued his professional education and training in the Mahachkala's College of Fine Arts, in Dagestan, and the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. He has been learning from his favorite artists: Breugel, Bosch and the Russian Avant-Garde master Filonov.
For many years, Vladimir had been struggling with rejection and repression due to the controversial subject of his art. His first solo exhibit was organized in 1983 by Nobel Laureate P.L. Kapitsa at the Institute of Physical Problems of the Academy of Science in the USSR. He became known to a selective circle of Moscow academicians, film and theater elite and foreign dignitaries. Soon Feoktistov's works were acquired by such a varied spectrum of collectors as the British Royal Family, French and Belgian ambassadors, and Italian and West German enterprenuers, including the President of Fiat Corporation. While there were a number of successful private exhibits in Moscow, public display was still often denied due to the controversial subject of his art. Feoktistov's painted public was far from carrying communism into a sunny future. By the end of the 80's, in the climate of glasnost', Feoktistov finally got major exposure of his work in exhibitions and in theatrical collaborations.
All the same his intent is not political, but universal, in the homely spirit of Dutch painter Pieter Brueghel, one of his acknowledged models. He thinks that life is tragic everywhere and it's too petty of a task to condemn the Soviet system. Floating across scenes of Gudermes, his hometown, are incongruent voluptuous nudes, absurd farm animals with human faces, unwieldy statues of Lenin, angelic figures borrowed from Feoktistov's Russian Orthodox faith, and improbable creatures evocative of Hieronymous Bosch, another of his favorites. His art is a giddy, murky painterly soup, evoking what its creator refers to as "the carnival emotions". "If people see pain," he says, "that's exactly what I am trying to inflict on the souls innocent and well-to-do viewers."
In 1989, he lived and worked for two years in Northern California. Upon his return in 1991, artist had discovered that a civil war was unfolding between Chechens and Russians. Dudaev, self-elected President of Chechnya at the time, announced the massacre on Russians residing in Chechnya. After two armed attacks by Chechen rebels, the artist was forced to flee his home with his family. After residing for several years in Moscow and St. Petersburg, he has settled near the Black Sea.