For the past few years, I have been involved in a particularly interesting project called the "Streak of immortality" by ORTA Art Group. Over the years, I accumulated a lot of materials, including texts and photographs. I decided to create a website as a personal project that would reflect the activities of our Art Group.
Our projects was inspired by the tragic yet uniquely charismatic life of the crazy avant-garde painter Sergey Kalmykov (1891-1967) – a Russian painter, student of famous Petrov-Vodkin, who is believed to inspire his teacher to create his famous ‘Bathing of a Red Horse’ painting and pose for the painting. In 1937, Kalmykov took off to a ‘far Almaty’ where he, until his death, worked in the local opera house, was the first and the last ever city ‘freak’, who would wear self-made flamboyant clothes ‘to be seen from the space’ and would talk to strangers on the city corners about his world-scale projects. His paintings are now exhibited at Kazakh state art museum, he is referred to as ‘our Van Gogh’, he was described in the novel ‘The Faculty of Useless Knowledge’ by a famous writer Yuri Dombrovski. But he spent his life as an unrecognized looser who had not a single personal exhibition and who died of starvation in a mental ward. He doesn’t even have a grave – he was useless, like a junk thrown in the garbage.
'The Streak of Immortality' is an endless project of creation installations, exhibition projects, photography, video- and audio-art pieces, books, neural networks as result of working with textual, visual, conceptual and existential assets in the form of 10,000 pages of manuscripts and 1,500 paintings of Sergey Kalmykov, who called himself a Genius, a Beef-head, a Moron, a Sci-fi Projecter and the Grossmeister of Linear Arts.
