Oscar Rabin (artist)

Oskar Yakovlevich Rabin (Russian: Оскар Яковлевич Рабин; born 2 January 1928) is a Russian painter, celebrated in the West as ‘Solzhenitsyn in painting’.
Oskar Rabin was one of the originators of non-conformism and one of the organisers of the ‘Lianozovo Group’ which grew up around Yevgeny Kropivnitsky. Over a period of seven years (1958-1965), the former camp barracks in Lianozovo, where Oskar Rabin lived with his wife, Valentina Kropivnitskaya, acted as the centre of the progressive intelligentsia. 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 1920s European expressionism. Rabin uses a distortion of perspective, the principles of deformation and the destruction of large-scale relationships.
Oskar Rabin was an organiser of the dissident Bulldozer Exhibition, an unofficial art exhibition on a vacant lot in the Belyayevo urban forest by Moscow avant-garde artists on September 15, 1974. The exhibition was forcefully broken up by a large police force that included bulldozers and water cannons.
In 1978, Oskar Rabin emigrated to Paris.