Self-Portrait

Gor Chahal is a mathematician by training, the author of poems and musical‑poetic performances, and one of the pioneers of multimedia art in Russia. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he was a member of Moscow’s art underground and rock scene. He was the founder of the performance groups Parallel Actions (1985–1987) and Theaterpost (1987–1988) and performed a series of actions with the art group World Champions (1988). In 1989, he played the lead role in Oleg Teptsov’s film The Initiated. In 1990, his debut solo exhibition took place at First Gallery (Moscow). In 1995 and 1996, he was a scholarship holder at the Berlin Academy of Arts and in 2004 at the Museum Quarter in Vienna. Since the late 1990s he has explored Christian themes, combining contemporary art, scientific methods, and theological discourse. In 2014, he became an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts and in 2022 a corresponding member of the Academy’s Department of New Art Trends.

The project For Cultural Leisure (1990–1992), of which the painting Self‑Portrait (1992) is part, was partly shown at the eponymous group exhibition at the Kashirka Exhibition Hall in 1990. The exhibition was a rethinking of the concept of leisure, inactivity, and freedom within sets and impressions that were familiar to a Soviet person.

In this series Gor Chahal continued to develop the idea of the “artist‑personality,” which he began with the series Poet and Pistol (1990) and borrowed from Soviet conceptual art of the 1970s. In Self‑Portrait Chahal’s subject is presented as a demonically handsome man at rest, with tousled hair, a white shirt with rolled‑up sleeves, Dva Myacha brand trainers, and a relaxed pose.

Through the aestheticization of his everyday behavior Chahal refers to visual performance and records social rituals, breaking them down until they are unrecognizable. His works anticipate the consciousness of the video clip, reflecting the fragmentary nature of the perception of reality. The combination of various techniques‑cinematographic photographs, painting, readymades (sledges, ties, a pile of books), collages‑is constructed on a symbolic duality. The abstract is contrasted with the realistic, color with black‑and‑white, the material with the imaginary. Chahal uses the Dadaist practice of destroying the canon, creating a new irrational collage from the chaotic, slippery reality of the era of perestroika.