Vladimir Yankilevsky

Vladimir Borisovich Yankilevsky was born on 15 February 1938 in Moscow. He received his first art instruction from his father, the painter Boris Yankilevsky, before entering the Moscow Secondary Art School, part of the Surikov Institute system, where he studied from 1950 to 1956. He then studied at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute's Faculty of Art from 1957 to 1962, graduating with a specialization in graphic arts and book illustration.

In 1962 his work, including the large multi-panel piece "Atomic Station" and a triptych titled "Two Beginnings," was shown at the Manezh exhibition marking the 30th anniversary of the Moscow Union of Artists, an exhibition that became a flashpoint when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev publicly denounced the nonconformist work on display. Yankilevsky continued to develop his triptych and relief-based practice through the following decades and was admitted to the Union of Artists of the USSR in 1980. His work was included in his first retrospective in Moscow in 1978 and in a New York retrospective in 1988.

He emigrated to New York in 1990 and settled in Paris in 1992, where he lived with his wife, Rimma Solod. Vladimir Yankilevsky died in Paris on 4 January 2018, a little more than a month before his 80th birthday; Wikipedia reports the cause of death as leukemia.

Yankilevsky is consistently described in Russian and Western sources as one of the central figures of Moscow's unofficial art scene and, in some accounts, one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism. His inclusion in the 1962 Manezh exhibition and the resulting confrontation with Khrushchev remain a touchstone reference point in histories of Soviet nonconformist art. His work later appeared in "RUSSIA!," the major 2005 survey of Russian art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and in a dedicated retrospective, "Heroic Monument," at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Critics and curators writing about him tend to emphasize his triptych format and his "existential box" constructions as attempts to hold male and female, individual and collective, and mechanical and organic forces within a single composition. Detailed, fully attributable critical commentary in major Western art press is limited relative to his historical stature, a gap that reflects his decades of exclusion from official Soviet exhibition channels rather than any absence of significance.

Yankilevsky's auction market is small and unevenly documented. Dealer summaries describe his auction record as USD 289,768, for "Adam and Eve. Triptych No. 5" at the Moscow auction house Vladey in 2017, though the exact sale date and a primary auction record for that figure could not be independently confirmed in current sources. A separate, documented result is "Head of a Man," which sold for GBP 22,502 (about USD 28,427) at MacDougall's; the exact sale date is not available in current sources. Most other recorded results, at Sotheby's and other houses, appear to run from the low thousands to the low tens of thousands of dollars, underscoring that his market remains thin and specialist, concentrated among dealers and auction houses focused on Russian nonconformist art.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Yankilevsky; verification of individual works currently depends on the artist's estate, gallery records, and museum provenance rather than a formal scholarly catalogue. Galerie Dina Vierny in Paris and Aktis Gallery in London are the galleries most consistently associated with showing and handling the estate, though no single exclusive estate representative is documented; recent exhibitions, including a 2025 show at Galerie Le Minotaure in Paris, point to ongoing market and curatorial attention. Reported auction figures for this artist vary considerably by source, and the widely cited headline record should be treated with some caution until it can be traced to a primary sale record. Collectors should weigh his deep museum presence, which is well documented, against a market history that remains sparse, illiquid, and not yet consistently tracked across public auction databases.