Sartol village (now Amangeldinsky district, Kostanay region of Kazakhstan) 1925-1993 Almaty

(1925, Sartol – 1993, Almaty) Moldakhmet Kenbayev was a key figure of the first postwar generation of Kazakh artists whose work helped articulate a distinctly Kazakh modernism within the visual language of Soviet art. He studied at the Kazakh State Theatre and Art College in the 1940s, where he was taught by Leonid Leontiev, and later at the Surikov Institute in Moscow. Returning to Almaty in 1956, he developed a practice of painting and monumental mosaics. His collaborations with Nikolai Tsivchinsky – Enlik-Kebek (1966) at the Almaty Hotel and Girl with a Souvenir (1970), now relocated to Koktobe, are mosaics that have become urban landmarks. As a teacher at the Alma-Ata Art College, he taught younger artists of the influential Sixtiers group such as Salikhitdin Aitbayev, Oralbek Nurjumayev and Maktum Qisamedin. In his canvases, broad bands of colour, elongated horizons and dynamic figures transform the Kazakh steppe into a living protagonist; a carrier of memory and personal longing. On the Virgin Lands reflects a 1954 summer spent documenting the Soviet agricultural campaign of the same name, while Grandmother in the Steppe, In the Mountains, and Feltwork offer meditative views of nomadic life.