Gulja, China 1940-1999

(1940, Kuldja – 1999, Almaty) A member of the Sixtiers generation that emerged during the Khrushchev Thaw, Bakhtiyar Tabiyev sought to articulate Kazakh national identity within the framework of Soviet art. His painterly language combined Kazakh and Tatar visual culture with elements of Soviet realism and European modernism. Born in the multiethnic Ili Valley in China, he moved with his family to Soviet Kyrgyzstan in 1955. There, he trained in art in Bishkek and later at the Surikov Institute in Moscow, before teaching for decades in Almaty and mentoring a new generation of artists, including Dulat Aliyev, who is also featured in Qonaqtar. Conversations with historian Lev Gumilev, who saw nomadic cultures as creative civilisational forces, inspired Tabiyev’s vision of a shared cultural memory across the Turkic world. His works reflect a synthesis of symbolism and everyday life. His painting Baursaqs turns traditional food making into a meditation on hospitality; Woman with Carpet and With a Goat frame the domestic as a spiritual space while his work Boy Taking Out a Splinter brings up an unusual subject to focus on vulnerability and care. Tabiyev helped define a uniquely Central Asian modernism, rooted in tradition yet in dialogue with global art.