Sergey Kalmykov
Sergey Kalmykov was an artist, writer, thinker, inventor, poet, and professional Genius of the First Interplanetary Category. He was born in 1891 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, then lived in Orenburg, Moscow, St. Petersburg, then traveled around central Russia until he came to work and live in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in 1935. He studied painting with Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, and, according to research, it was he who gave the latter the idea for one of the most famous symbols of the Russian avant-garde and revolution — the painting Bathing of the Red Horse, painted in 1912. Even then, Kalmykov’s influence and connection with historical events began to manifest itself on some invisible level.
ORTA undertakes a rigorous examination of past and present, addressing fundamental questions of existence and the structure of the world while consciously rejecting established critical frameworks. Building on the legacy of Kazakh artist and inventor Sergey Kalmykov (1891–1967), they have developed the Theory of the New Genius, a practice through which they produce theater works, performances, installations, sound, visual and video projects, workshops, lectures, and large-scale Planetary Projects — inventing both the artistic forms and the language needed to explore and articulate the questions at the heart of their work.
In Almaty, Kalmykov lived a lonely life as an unwanted and unrecognized artist, working as a modest designer at the State Opera and Ballet Theater and retiring with a meager salary of 52 rubles. He died of multiple organ failure due to poor nutrition in 1967. Shortly before, his neighbors called the police, who broke into his apartment and found him already dying of hunger. Everyone knew him as the town madman, so an ambulance took him to a mental hospital, where they tried to nurse him back to health for almost two months, but in vain.
In 2022, Kazakhstan presented its first-ever pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art — and this first pavilion, curated and participated in by the ORTA group, was dedicated to Sergey Kalmykov, and all the leading art publications in the world wrote about him, and he will now remain in the centuries. Here again his influence on world events was manifested through a unique philosophy, a system of approach to life and creativity, which Rustem Begenov and Alexandra Morozova called The New Genius Theory and which they have been crystallizing in their projects since 2016.
Texts about
Sergey Kalmykov
Alexander Brener
Catalogue for the Kazakhstan Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. Sacred Expositions of the Great and Immortal LAI–PI–CHU–PLEE–LAPA. Milan: Foundation for Contemporary Art in Kazakhstan, 2022.
Valentina Buchinskaya
Catalogue for the Kazakhstan Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. Sacred Expositions of the Great and Immortal LAI–PI–CHU–PLEE–LAPA. Milan: Foundation for Contemporary Art in Kazakhstan, 2022.
The Telegraph, 21 Apr 2022