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‘I began to move into a world of imagination... carefully worked landscapes...In terms of painting, modulated light effects interested me more than purely coloristic contrasts...It reflected pretty much perfectly my very private life, full of repressed feelings and dreams mixed with fantasies about some magic deliverance from it.’ The Evolution of My Work, Oleg Prokofiev

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Oleg Prokofiev studied under the painter Robert Falk. His instinctive painterly intrests were concerned with the avant guard artists of the modern period, with abstaction, formalism, as well as with expressionist, surreal and symbolist elements. Modernism in Russia continued in an unofficial, underground manner by artists, like Oleg, who were not patronised by the state, were not members of the artists union and were regarded as representatives of decadent, bourgoise, elitest art. The influence of Malevich and the Russian, pre-revolutionary artists can be seen, as well as influences from western art.

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