Oscar Rabin

Oscar Rabin (Russian, born in 1928)

Bouquet of Flowers in Urban Landscape

‘I worked as if possessed, trying to paint slick, syrupy, ‘safe’ things which were easily within the reach of the understanding of the ‘powers that be’. I then destroyed these paintings one by one. I just couldn’t bear to look at them’. 

Soviet material life and its dramatic absurdity was for many years the central theme of Rabin’s creativity.

The artist’s favourite genres included landscape, still-life and interiors, continuing in the tradition of 1920’s European expressionism. Rabin uses a distortion of perspective, the principals of deformation and the destruction of large-scale relationships.