1948   Born in Chita, Russia

1971   Graduated from the Moscow Polygraphic Institute (Graphics Department)

1971-88   Worked as book illustrator for various Moscow publishers

1972-82   Lecturer at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute

1980   Member of the USSR Artists’ Union

1992   "Artist and Critic". "Studio 20" Gallery, Moscow, Russia
"Body Teaching" (together with M. Mikhalchuk). Institute of Philosophy at the Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, Russia

1993   "Naive Spouse". Gallery "Velta", Moscow, Russia

1994   "Victory and Defeat. Hitler’s Artist’s Niece". Institute of Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia
"Victory and Defeat". "Obscuri Viri" Gallery, Moscow, Russia
"Hollywood". "Studio 20" Gallery, Moscow, Russia

1995   "Salvation of Spaces". TV Gallery, Moscow, Russia
"Thoughts". "Studio 20" Gallery, Moscow
"Salvation of Spaces". Seminar "Human Being in the Era of Electronic technologies". TV Gallery, Contemporary Art Center, Moscow, Russia

1997   "Spaces We Save Are Dependent on Our Will and Sense". Art Media Center "TV Gallery", Contemporary Art Center, Moscow, Russia

1987   "Representation". "Hermitage" Literary Association, Moscow, Russia
"Retrospection of Moscow Artists’ Works. 1957-1987". "Hermitage" Literary Association, Moscow, Russia
"A Place to Live". "Hermitage" Literary Association, Moscow, Russia

1988   "New Soviet Art". Exhibition Hall, Oktyabrskaya 26, Moscow, Russia
International Triennial of Drawings. Wroclaw, Poland

1989   "Form and Image". Sumi, Ukraine
"Graphics of Moscow Artists: to the City and the World". Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia

1990   "Three". Gallery "Moscow Palette", Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia
"Soviet Avant-Garde Art, 1920-1980". Gallery "Moscow Palette", Minsk, Belorussia
1990-91   "The Pyramid Show". Gallery "Moscow Palette", Sydney, Adelaide, Australia

1991   "Modern Artists to Malevich". The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia
"АRТ-MIF-2" (program "The Names"). Manege, Moscow, Russia

1992   "In the Middle of the World". Tomsk Regional Museum, Tomsk, Russia
"KKKK". Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia
"Kennen Sie diese Namen?" Raissa Galerie, Erfurt, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany
"Still Life of the End of XX Century". Gallery "Moscow Palette". Moscow Architectural Institute, Moscow, Russia

1993   "Monuments: Transformation for the Future". Contemporary Art Center, Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia; ICA, New York, USA
"National Traditions and Postmodernism". The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia
"Indo-Russia" (together with N. Kotel). Contemporary Art Center Laboratory, Moscow, Russia

1994   "Monumental Propaganda". ICA, World Trade Center, New York, USA
Swimming Pool "Moscow" (exhibition & action). Swimming Pool "Moscow", Moscow, Russia
"My Short Experiment with Realism". Project "ESCAPE". Contemporary Art Center Curators Studio. Contemporary Art Center, Moscow, Russia
"Pictures from Russia". Gallery "Moscow Palette", Moscow, Russia

1995   "Turnkey Party". Marat Guelman Gallery, Polytechnic Museum, Moscow, Russia
"Apocalypse". The State Russian University of Humanities, Moscow, Russia

1996   "Galleries in the Gallery". Exhibition of Moscow galleries at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia
"Artoteka". National Contemporary Art Center, Goethe German Cultural Center, Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia

1997   "Credo" (Curated by Larisa Kachouk). Russian Fund for Culture, Moscow, Russia
"Metamorphosis of Quiet and Still Life". Russian Fund for Culture, Moscow, Russia
"Salon Digital" Expo 2000. Goethe Institute, Germany, Art Media Center "TV Gallery", Mathematic Institute, Russia

1998   "Second Clause. Courage". Contemporary Art Center, Moscow, Russia
"Moscow Artists". National Contemporary Art Center; Art Center "Forum", Yaroslavl; Municipal Gallery, Kostroma; Landscape Museum, Ples; Museum of Fine Arts, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

1999   "Total Recall". Art Media Center "TV Gallery", Moscow, Russia

V. Mayakovsky Museum, Moscow, Russia
Tomsk Art Museum, Tomsk, Russia
Muzeum sztuki w Lodzi, Lodz, Poland
Museum of Czech Literature, Prague, Czechia
Grand Duce of Luxembourg Collection
Owned by E. Peshler, Switzerland

"Vladimir Salnikov’s Artist Studio", magazine "Children’s Literature", #9, 1983
"Vladimir Salnikov’s Artist Studio", magazine "Peoples’ Friendship", #2, 1988
N. Smirnova. "How to Draw a Bird", magazine "Books’ World", #10, 1983
"Pyramid Show, Exhibition catalogue, 1990, Melbourne, Australia

Actually, what am I doing in art?
Keep moving somewhere, under the pressure of escaping and totally uncontrollable forces of curiosity and unwillingness to fit in some ordinary frame. God forbid! I wouldn’t like to mimicrize imperceptibly for myself, so I keep my eyes glued on my own silhouette – how does it look against a common background? Of course, it entails some problems, though non-fatal so far. But then I am not rotting alive – it would certainly happen once I started more strictly following all those rules and bans that define a modern Moscow artist’s configuration. And I can afford myself to make up geopolitical theories, present TV sermons (in accordance with a dogma of my own called "Salvation of Spaces") and at the same time paint portraits and the nude symbolizing the Beautiful, the basis of the whole Soviet regime. Not to be or to become an abstract person, who could be easily calculated, predicted, manipulated, encoded – this is what art means for me. To avoid all this in order to remain infantile, capricious, voluntaristic and schizoid, to behave as a prima donna, i.e. to have a right to be regressive – this is art for me. It’s quite another matter how to gain this – this is philosophy. To be in art means to be in mother’s womb.

I could hardly name any of the nowadays artists who would be involved in the art of portrait in the way Vladimir Salnikov is. We are used to what traditional paintings have taught us, i.e. that a portrait is a kind of an instant print, picturesque face copy, even if the traces of time accumulate in the final momentary image as a result of numerous seances during which a desirable face was eventually showing up. However, for Vladimir Salnikov the portrait is first of all a sort of genre task, every time building its genre frame along with the image being created. But it does not mean that everything should be balanced and put together to get a comfortable composition to watch (though the artist has to think of this as well); the matter is that every time the possibilities of the genre itself are to be mastered parallel to the image showing up. And if that’s the case, then "realism" or "accuracy" of these works does not mean pure resemblance (the artist will always please us with this as well), but it means to what extent this resemblance fits in this specific genre. In other words, this resemblance will depend on the work composition required by a definite object, on used or invented technique and, in the end, on impossibility to predict what will come out of such "application". The genre will come to existence, more proper, will develop along with each separate work. And I have to say once again that this is the genre of the portrait.

When I speak about Vladimir Salnikov’s portraits, I mean not only the portraits themselves (by the way, mostly women’s portraits) but paintings in general, formally not implicated in the portrait genre. Huge canvases depicting various parts of a woman’s body – surprising, how their massiveness has been muffled by the material ephemerality (the point is the smoke-colored cover over the number of canvases) – these canvases present those very portraits. Even hieroglyphic compositions consisting of a number of symbols colored at random are still a sort of portrait. This portrait has been divide d in numerous components that seemingly have nothing to do with the face being depicted; however, the image is based on them. It can be said that this is a portrait of the elements being depicted.

The question is – what does the genre of the portrait mean? I suppose, in the very structure of the portrait genre there has been defined some face, its main characteristics. Even if the face itself is not there, this is an initial scheme (along with our body) according to which we locate ourselves and move in the world, a kind of marked screen accepting all our projections and returning them to us. Vladimir Salnikov seems to keep asking himself the following questions: How do our meetings with the world happen? How do we meet and recognize each other? How do we happen to know all things? How do we master the landscape? He is asking himself, addressing those invisible and hard structures underlying our life. Vladimir Salnikov is studying the portrait as the way we have built ourselves and at the same time – which had been built for us. As if every time the artist performs all things we have to do through habit: he does not trust all those things that our consciousness transfers to the field of physical automatism obeying to the savings law. He tries to master man’s way in the world in his each work, as well as the scheme that helps to organize this way, having made it an object of presentation, including the one of paintings. Vladimir Salnikov seems to keep to the two poles at the same time, i.e. to what has been performed, and the performance mechanism itself – what is developing along with possible identifications but so far is free of them.

I think it is quite natural that, studying the portrait as an element come-to-be, setting free its elementary foundations, the artist is presenting us his own image, showing it as a preaching face. This close-up face living in time, involved in mimic plays – of course it is unique and at the same time is an ordinary face. Again bifurcation problem is there – the face as a scheme and as an imperceptible excess of something alive. A portrait in paintings as if balancing on this verge – Vladimir Salnikov just reminds us how a portrait becomes the portrait.

E. Petrovskaya