STATEMENT 
Dr Christina Lodder catalogue introduction 
"The abstract language of his works is distilled from the urban landscape in which he lives, with its gaunt buildings, tarmac streets and factories, its demolition sites, slums and rare and precious vegetation. Kudryashov's prints and reliefs capture the austere poetry of these surroundings and they sometimes incorporate the notation of his own city experiences: explicit references to the houses, streets and tramlines of Moscow, the stark outlines of half-demolished buildings, and even violent incidents which he witnessed in his youth." 

Mark Gisbourne on Oleg Kudryashov in Apollo  
"...an artist who sought a Russian art that put aside the fake heroism of Socialist Realism." 
"...born under Stalin it was for him no longer possible to have such an utopian view of the role of art in the service of the state." 
"...His figurative drawings are comical, satirical, and on occasion, macabre, yet still reflecting an essentially Russian experience of life, humour and laughter being always the most subversive of responses to a dogmatic ideology." 
"Oleg Kudryashov's art is Russian in every sense, without, it seems, the slightest trace of British or Western influence. Indeed, it is of a specific Russian agenda, deeply indebted to the modernist period before Stalin forced artists either to conform to the propagandizing slogans of Socialist Realism's banal figuration , or to abandon art altogether.....Stalin's forced curtailmment of a particular modernist lineof enquiry left for him a whole series of questions unanswered, avenues of thought and practice not investigated." 

Dr Christina Lodder on Oleg Kudryashov in Art Monthly 
"Kudryashov's work inevitably recalls the bold and daring experimentation of the Russian Suprematists and Constructivists during the 1910s and 1920s, especially in the handling of materials, the extension into and incorporation of real space, the dynamism of the forms and to the process itself. The language in which these are expressed, however, is Kudryashov's own." 

"Kudryashov is not connected with the Russian dissident art movement which is well known here (in the UK) through the exhibition several years ago at the ICA. He did not exhibit in that show, which consisted almost entirely of reworkings of old ideas, lacking for the most part technical expertise and any inspiration. Kudryashov's isolation from that group was of his own choosing. Similarly when he was living in the Soviet Union he held himself aloof from successful, official circles and the dissident movement alike. Kudryashov was not one of those artists who manufactured paintings and sold them to foreigners living in Moscow. In Russia, Kudryashov worked alone in great poverty and secrecy- burning most of his prolific output. He followed his own path- making no compromises with official requirements. That lack of compromise with accepted norms and commercial expectations has also characterised his work in the West."