Sergey Maslov
Born in Samara in 1952. He lived and worked in Almaty.
The artist Sergey Maslov worked with a variety of media, including painting, performance, installation, video and text. He began his artistic career in the late 1980s and headed the Night Tram art group, which developed variations on Oriental mysticism and stylistic eclecticism. He later joined the circle of Voyager Gallery and became its unofficial ideologist. Mythmaking became his main creative strategy.
According to one of his myths, Maslov killed himself in order to prolong the life of his idol, the singer Whitney Houston, with whom he maintained a romantic correspondence. In his other projects, Maslov presented himself as an alien, a vampire or a magician. In his art, he managed to capture the small details of Post-Soviet reality, which he then transformed into universal manifestations of the absurdity of life, as, for example, in his installation, Survival Instructions for the Citizens of the Former USSR. In his paintings Maslov explored the themes of sexuality and corporeality, which became important subjects in his critique of the official patriarchal discourse of the new nation building.
He died unexpectedly in 2002, leaving behind numerous paintings, drawings, films, manuscripts, and various unfinished projects.
Maslov was a subject of numerous personal exhibitions, including Astral Nomad at the National Museum in Astana (2017), Maslov i K at Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts in Bishkek (2004), Sergey Maslov. East is a Subtle Thing to Understand at Stuttgarter Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2002) and Maslov riadom s iskusstvom, okolo literaturi at A. Kasteev Museum of Arts in Almaty (1998). His works were also exhibited at such important group shows as Central Asia Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), Off the Silk Road: No Mad's Land: Contemporary Art from Central Asia at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2002), re-orientation: Kunst zu Mittelasien at ACC Gallery in Weimar (2002).
Maslov’s paintings are in the collections of the A. Kasteev Museum of Arts, Almaty, East Kazakhstan Regional Nevzorovs’ Museum of Fine Arts, Semey, M HKA, Antwerp and Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick.