"Zelenine carries to Paris the nonconformist gaze forged in the studios and camps of Siberia."
Born in 1938 in Novokuznetsk, Siberia, Édouard Zelenine trained in Sverdlovsk and at the Leningrad Academy of Fine Arts before being expelled for refusing to conform to official Soviet doctrine. He became a central figure of the Nonconformist movement, exhibiting clandestinely in artists' apartments and taking part in the landmark 1974 open-air "Bulldozer Exhibition" in Moscow. Arrested and finally authorised to leave the USSR, he settled in Paris in 1975, where he continued to paint in relative independence from the market until his death in 2002. His work carries into the French capital the visionary, dissident gaze forged in the unofficial ateliers of Siberia and Leningrad.