b. 1949, Tashkent; d. 2008, Almaty, Kazakhstan

Rustam Khalfin was born on October 14, 1949 in Tashkent in the family of front-line soldier Nurmukhamed Abdrakhmanovich Khalfin. From 1950 to 2007 he lived and worked in Alma-Ata.In 1972 he graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute.From 1972 to 1983 Rustam Khalfin worked in design institutes in Alma-Ata, simultaneously engaged in painting. Since 1983, devoting himself entirely to art, he turned to the traditions of abstractionism and Russian avant-garde. From painting, pencil drawing Khalfin passes to photography, object, installation and video.Since 1995 Khalfin worked in the direction of postmodernism, as an artist-conceptualist carried out his activities in the framework of major art projects such as “Eurasian Utopia”, “Clay Project”, in video-art “Northern Barbarians”.In 1998 he created a group of artists “Zero Level”, around the same time was the organizer and director of his own gallery of contemporary art “Look”, until 2001. “Clay Project” occupied both floors of the ‘LOOK’ gallery: on the first floor is a huge figure of a man, he is so huge that one knee and arm seem to pierce the ceiling and protrude on the clay floor of the second floor. Exhibited in the Central Asia Pavilion at the prestigious Venice Biennale, when Kazakh contemporary art was first presented to the world.Rustam's wife and muse was the artist Lidia Blinova, with whom Khalfin regularly held apartment exhibitions.Rustam Khalfin died on December 31, 2008, in the village of Ungurtas in Kazakhstan.