Serge Poliakoff at Cheim Read

Cheim & Read gallery is pleased to present a survey of paintings by one of the foremost post-war European abstractionists, the Russian-born Serge Poliakoff (1900–1969). At a moment when the accepted canon of abstract painting is in radical revision, an encounter with the work of Poliakoff is the best kind of rediscovery: it disrupts our sense of continuity as it restores it.

A product of the Russian diaspora that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, Poliakoff fled to the West, educating himself in the art schools and museums of London and Paris. He painted every day while raising a family, supporting this life by playing Russian folk songs on guitar in Parisian nightclubs late into the night. This hectic existence lasted well into his forties, when twenty years of foundational pictorial research finally came to fruition in a distinctive synthesis of painterly sensuality and ideational planarity.