Atyrau region 1937-2011 Almaty

(1937, Yesbol – 2011, Almaty) Abdirashit Sydykhanov was part of the Kazakh Sixtiers, a generation of artists who emerged during the Khrushchev Thaw and sought to forge a new artistic vocabulary grounded in local cultural traditions, often fused with global artistic currents. A graduate of the Alma-Ata Art School, he spent over twenty-five years as a set designer at Kazakhfilm, a key site of film production in Soviet Kazakhstan. In the 1980s, his painting shifted toward a mythopoetic language that drew on post-Impressionist expressiveness, Sufi thought and early Kazakh symbolic forms. From then on, his world features boats, animals, female figures and childhood as metaphors for memory, transformation and renewal. He adopted elements of abstraction and textured surface as central components of his formal approach. The artist’s turn to ancient Kazakh imagery and local spiritual practices can be read as a postcolonial gesture – reclaiming ancestral symbolism and decolonising visual language to process the trauma of the Soviet regime. The works on view in Qonaqtar reflect this trajectory: 41st Year (1975–6) reflects on food making during wartime scarcity, while later I Am a Child Again (2002) speaks to rebirth. The painting Steppe Amazon in the Moonlight (2007) challenges the romanticized view of the steppe cherished by earlier generations through darker imagery.