Sergey and Alexey Tkachevs

1922, 1925

Sergey and Alexey Tkachevs were born in the Bryansk region in the early 1920s in a peasant family. After moving from their native village to the small town of Bezhitsa, both took up an artistic career. In 1938 the elder brother Sergey entered the Vitebsk Art School, while Alexey was taken to the Surikov Secondary Art School in 1939. After the war the brothers studied at the V.I. Surikov Moscow Art Institute in the class of the famous artist Sergey Gerasimov (1885-1964).

The main topics of Tkachev’s monumental canvases are the rural life observations: life and death, work and repose, weddings, births and funerals. Mainly, Tkachevs recreate situations from the everyday life — both private and collective — taken from an anonymous village. According to the internal pathos and the universal character of their paintings’ subjects, Tkachev brothers can be compared to another outstanding artist of their era – Geliy Korzhev (1925-2012), especially where their appeal to military times testifies the latent criticism of the current events.

In the 1990s, Tkachev brothers created an epic painting series called “They Fought for Their Country”, dedicated to the events of the WWII, based on the same name novel of Mikhail Sholokhov. Paradoxically, it was precisely in those years when a number of realist artists felt the urge for a retrospective, almost nostalgic reference to the key milestones of Russian patriotic identity. According to them, “false and wrong modern assessments of the Great Patriotic War events” made them speak about the most important national issues anew.

Today, Tkachev brothers are deservedly recognized as the classics of the post-war painting, the heirs of Soviet social realists such as the already mentioned Sergei Gerasimov, Mitrofan Grekov, Isaac Brodsky and others.

Medea Margoshvili