Nikolai Vatagin
Familiar Faces

A fourth generation artist, Nikolai Vatagin was born into a family which has long since firmly established itself in the Russian art history. Since childhood, he has been helping his mother with her commission copy paintings, but ultimately chose the medium of sculpture. His preferred material is wood – the Russians’ archetypal source of nearly everything, from cradles to coffins, from pagan idols to Orthodox icons.

‘I hew what I love!’ is the artist’s current motto. Nikolai carved his first wooden figurine, a portrait of Leo Tolstoy, at the age of 23, on a night shift during compulsory military service. Since then he has created more than 400 sculptures out of wood. ‘I am enraptured by the very process of it: it takes lots of effort wielding both the axe and the chisel. One feels like a real man doing hard work,’ says the artist.

Humour and sarcasm allow Vatagin to abandon the restrictions of any pronounced tradition, although his artistic manner does betray certain influences of both the icon painting canon and folk art, including traditional wooden toys and lubok prints. At the same time, his signature technique demonstrates a kind of concision that seems to have been inherited from his grandfather, famous animalier sculptor Vasily Vatagin. Nikolai’s sculptures are unfailingly recognisable: prior to embarking on a new project, the artist carefully studies lifetime photographs of the cultural luminaries he intends to depict, reads their memoirs and the accounts of their contemporaries. The inimitable combination of realistic portraiture and lubok-like conceit brings forth a truly Postmodernist ironic take on the familiar figures of authority. ‘Pushkin feels like someone of kin to me: I’ve read all his works,’ admits the artist. ‘He and Dostoevsky are my close friends. With others, like Andrey Platonov for instance, I bear grudge. And there are still others I argue with and consider my enemies . . . Although at the end of the day I love all of them.’

The sculptor is fully absorbed in his iconoclastic games, creating what might be called ‘anti-monuments’: lively, whimsical, naively caricatural, but incredibly real. All of his characters project an absurd mix of self-importance and slight incongruity. Each of these portraits is a perfect reflection of personality, creative sensibility, and the time at large.