Nemukhin has quite early found his own style, playing upon the motif of playing cards on the canvas, combining painting and graphic techniques, as well as using the collage technique. Since the mid-1960s, he has worked on semi-abstract still lifes with cards that might be attributed to one of the manifestations of Informalism on the Russian art scene of the time.

In the work "Cock" from the collection of our museum, the artist returns to the pictorial and plastic language of expressionism, which he had mastered during the early period of his oeuvre. In 1980-1990s, the artist often referred to the image of the cock in painting and graphics. This image can also be often found in the works of other representatives of unofficial art and the artists of "Left MOSKh" (Moscow Union of Artists) – in the works of A. Zverev and V. Yakovlev, brothers A. and P. Smoliny and E. Strulev.

Evgenia Sergeeva-Zelfond

A fragment of an article for the "Russian unofficial art of the second half of the XX century" collection for guidebooks of the "Twenty-five" series