Oleg Nikoliuck

211. Battleship "Korean" 39 x 43 inches, oil on canvas SOLD

Oleg Nikoliuck was born in Moscow in 1926. His parents were victims of Stalin's repressions in the 1930s, so he grew up at a orphanage in the southern part of Russia. He completed a course of study as a plane mechanic in 1944, and was promptly sent to the front lines of World War II. In 1951 Nikoliuck arrived in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and entered the Serov Art College. He began exhibiting his work shortly after his graduation in 1956. In 1961 Nikoliuck joined the Artists' Union of Russia.

Until 1987 Nikoliuck worked primarily in the area of industrial graphics. He received the Grand Prix at the international exhibit in Czechoslovakia in 1971. Back in 1962 Alexander Baturin, one of the most influential members of the Sterligov Group, introduced Nikoliuck to his teacher, Vladimir Sterligov, whose ideas impacted Nikoliuck's works greatly. The Sterligov Group had been a progressive force in the art world of St. Petersburg since the 1930s. Sterligov himself had studied with a famous Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich. Nikoliuck's work, continuing the tradition of his teachers, concentrates on the examination and expression of the dynamic properties of form.

Nikoliuck's paintings can be seen in private collections in Russia, Finland, France, and Germany.