Oleg Yakhnin is the initiator, organizer and artistic director of various large-scale Russian and international graphic art forums in St. Petersburg (Biennale and Triennale of Graphic Arts). Being an artist of bright temperament, he is engaged in painting, graphic art, and book illustrating. For many years Yakhnin had been a member of the Board of the St. Petersburg Union of Artists. “I might not always be the best artist, but I’m always the leader”, – says the artist. Indeed, the art life of St. Petersburg wouldn’t be complete without Yakhnin's initiatives. He implements numerous art and publishing projects in Russia and abroad, feeling responsible for Russian and in particular St. Petersburg graphic art.

It may seem that Yakhnin never sleeps and lives a life of continuous creative or organizational activities. His efficiency is impressive. He is not only a master of easel art, whose works are present in the Tretyakov Gallery, the Hermitage, the State Russian Museum, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the Dresden Old Masters Picture Gallery, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection) and in dozens of regional Russian museums, but also an fruitful illustrator. He created illustrations for more than 70 books, among them there are fairy tales by A. Lindgren, “Little Zaches, Great Zinnober” by E.T.A. Hoffmann, novels by A. Chekhov, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” by Ken Kizi and many other books and children’s magazines.

But first of all Oleg Yakhnin is a graphic artist who is skilled in almost all classic techniques of printmaking. Graphics is also characteristic for his original style of painting.

The Black & White exhibition at the Erarta Museum features original monumental graphic works and black-and-white paintings. A couple of colour works add an element of intrigue to the overall atmosphere of the show.

The show emphasizes the large-scale landscapes, both black-and-white and coloured, endowed with unusual for the artist epic contemplation. There are also portraits of contemporaries and works from the series "Chimeras" ­– a long time developed topic of existential contradictions and a form of personal inner dialogue. According to A. Borovsky, “these are chimeras of his own consciousness: they are always sitting on the artist’s shoulders, and their vitality is in his soul confusion”. But this is a visually structured confusion. Certainty and confidence are intrinsic to the author's style of painting – active, superfluous, phantasmagoric, sometimes outsized, but always saturated with pictorial energy.

On the whole, the exhibition represents only a small fragment of Oleg Yakhnin’s diverse work and demonstrates the outstanding examples of skilful and tireless drawing art.