'Steppe Story' by Zorikto Dorzhiev

Hay Hill Gallery is pleased to welcome Zorikto Dorszhiev’s “Steppe Story” into it’s Cork St venue following it’s grand opening exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum on 22nd November 2011. The show features over 50 painted, graphic and sculptural works including images of warriors and beauties, old men and children, horses, birds and various depictions of genre scenes.

Zorikto has emerged as one of Russia's most acclaimed young artists, with his work exhibited in 2008 at the Council of Europe and the Beijing Olympics, and his recent series Steppe Story shown for two months at St Petersburg's Russian Museum in 2009. Along with precise draughtsmanship and vivid colour, Zorikto displays subtle humour and a gift for caricature.

Zorikto’s work is associated with the folk and Buddhist traditions of the Buryat people. Symbols of human existence, the tradition of birth to death all feature as a key philosophy behind his work. His paintings display graphic silhouettes textured with “jewel-like” or “hand-made” precision to create an almost theatrical effect.

His success lies in his ability to think over the specifics of life on the steppe (a vast semiarid grass-covered plain) capturing its spatial codes and coordinates, including the organization of daily activity within an extreme environment where temperatures vary from +40C to -40C. Zorikto’s works are pervaded by a relentless sense of humour yet compassionate to the life and suffering of the Buryat. He is equally at home portraying sensuous females – his iconic Mona Lisa Khatun has been dubbed the “Madonna of the Steppes” – or warriors on horseback, evoking Buryats' Mongol ancestors. “For me a nomad is a thinker”, says Dorzhiev, ”not some kind of tourist in search of new sensations and a better life. He is an artist, a poet, a philosopher; after all, it’s easier to contemplate in solitude... sooner or later steppe will allow him to meet another nomad.”

Zorikto Dorzhiev was born in 1976 in Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia a republic of the Russian Federation on the border of Mongolia. In 2002 he graduated "magna cum laude" from the Institute of Fine Arts in Krasnoyarsk (Western Siberia). He has worked as a set-designer for Sergei Bodrov’s blockbuster movie Mongol, and illustrated Isay Kalashnikov's The cruel Age; he also designs traditional-style Buryat head-dresses.

Zorikto Dorzhiev is well known in Russia where solo exhibitions have been held in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg as well as the Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow, Tibet House, New York, private collections (José Manuel Durão Barroso, President of the European Commission, Guy Laliberté, Cirque du Soleil and so on). He also has a growing international reputation in London, Strasbourg, Brussels and Luxembourg and in Taipei as well as Beijing. The artist is represented in the UK and around the world by the celebrated Moscow Khankhalaev Gallery since 2005.