At the Anna Akhmatova Museum in St Petersburg, Khvostenko – a hero of Russian underground – turns found materials into sculptural instruments, where line, form, and sound collide in dynamic harmony.

Alexei Khvostenko (1940–2004), or ‘Khvost’, 'tail' in English, was one of the defining figures of late twentieth-century Russian culture, yet his importance has still not been fully grasped. A poet, prose writer, playwright, painter, graphic artist, and sculptor, he is best known to a wide audience as a songwriter and performer; in reality, however, he was a universal creator – un artiste complet, in his own words.

The Anna Akhmatova Museum in St Petersburg last presented Khvostenko’s work in a solo exhibition in 2005, a year after his death. The current exhibition, ‘To Each Their Own Khvost’, draws on the same body of work shown in Moscow at the Zverev Centre in 2004, but here the curatorial emphasis falls more squarely on his personality. The works are complemented by the artist’s notebooks and by recollections from his many friends and contemporaries. Khvostenko was always marked by a fiercely independent stance, yet as an avant-garde figure he stood at the very heart of artistic life and contemporary cultural events, constantly shaping both over the course of his life.

From early childhood Khvostenko was living in Leningrad (today St Petersburg). He attended the city’s first English-language school, founded by his father, a respected translator of English literature. From an early age, his many-sided gifts were allied to an artistic temperament and a fiercely independent spirit. After leaving school, he went on to study at an art college, before spending several years at the Leningrad Theatre Institute under the celebrated stage designer Nikolai Akimov (1901–1968).

Despite a way of life that repeatedly led to arrests and prosecution on charges of “parasitism”, Khvostenko was a man of remarkable knowledge and rare erudition. From the late 1950s onwards, a broad circle of writers and artists from Leningrad’s uncensored cultural milieu gathered around him. In 1963, together with the poets Henri Volokhonsky (1936–2018) and Leonid Entin (1938–2016), he founded the literary group ‘Verpa’. The songs he wrote with Volokhonsky, performed to guitar accompaniment, soon gained wide circulation and lasting popularity.

In his poetry, Khvostenko drew on and transformed a range of non-orthodox literary traditions, from seventeenth-century Russian syllabic-tonic verse to Futurism – above all the poetry of Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh. In 1968 he moved to Moscow, and in 1977 he emigrated from the USSR, settling in Paris while spending extended periods in Israel, England and the United States. In 1981, ‘Farewell to the Steppe’, a collection of his best-known songs performed by the author himself, was released in London.

In the late 1980s, a Russian squat took shape on Rue Juliette Dodu in Paris, with Khvostenko at its centre. He founded the Association Symposion to support cultural figures and became vice-president of the Paris-based Association of Russian Artists, Gaelia. In cultural terms, the significance of ‘Khvost’ is comparable to that of ‘Iliazd’ – the Georgian artist and writer Ilia Zdanevich (1894–1975), a key representative of the previous wave of Russian emigration.

In 1987, the song ‘Golden City’, written by Khvostenko and Volokhonsky to a baroque melody and evoking the Heavenly Jerusalem together with the symbols of the four Evangelists, was included in the soundtrack to the film ‘Assa’, performed by Boris Grebenshcikov. From that moment, Khvostenko’s return to Russia began. In the early 1990s, he met the young musicians of the band Auktyon; the first result of their collaboration was the album ‘Teapot of Wine’ (1992), followed by concerts and performances in Moscow, St Petersburg and Kyiv.

“In the first place, I consider myself a poet. But I began to engage in art more or less professionally as a visual artist. I don’t know which I am more – a poet or a painter. Both together,” Khvostenko said in one of his last interviews, in 2004. As an artist, he continues the line of vsechestvo (“everythingism”) – a strategy of the early twentieth-century Russian Futurists that sought to synthesise all techniques and discoveries within the act of creation. Khvostenko was an extraordinarily prolific author, yet his artistic legacy remains scattered and poorly documented, making it difficult to present it comprehensively.

The exhibition ‘To Each Their Own Khvost’ features work from the early 2000s, created in Paris and brought from there by Alisa Tille, the artist’s third wife (Khvostenko was married five times). The project was initiated and curated by Sergei Vasiliev, director of the group Auktyon. The design of the exhibition is by art group Manufaktura PTKh, formed by contemporary artists Zhenya Isaeva and Masha Nebesnaya (b. 1986), who are closely connected to the theatre. They have conceived the exhibition space in a distinctly theatrical manner: works are displayed on old wooden easels and stepladders, some of which have been transformed into vitrines for manuscripts, photographs and video.

In the same 2004 interview, Khvostenko described the beginnings of his artistic path and its development: “I was fascinated by Pollock and by Pop Art. A young person is always drawn to entirely different things. Nevertheless, I tried to bring all of this together into something unified. I wanted these works to resonate within a single current. Gradually, however, I found my own style and have worked within it ever since. Georealism – the style I invented – takes its name, or rather was given its name by me, from the earth, first of all as primordial chaos and disorder, to geometry, that is, absolute calm and balance. And it is precisely these two principles that, in my view, have shaped the style characteristic of my recent works.”

As the scholar of unofficial culture Stanislav Savitsky observes, characterising the artistic strategy of Khvostenko and of his poetic collaborator Volokhonsky “they not only fail to see any opposition between pop art and the aesthetics of Jackson Pollock, but find it entirely natural to draw simultaneously on the experience of both. The Leningrad neo-avant-gardists have not the slightest desire to bury modernism, which in the Leningrad of those years – and these artists were radical for late Soviet art as a whole – was far from being exhausted.”

Unfortunately, the paintings of the 1960s are not included in this exhibition. Yet the semi-automatic technique of dripping, which at the time attracted many artists by virtue of its absolute freedom and the naturalness of the creative gesture – something especially significant in the USSR – largely determined the formal devices visible in the objects and works on paper by Khvostenko shown here.

His works clearly trace their lineage to the classical avant-garde – above all Futurism and Dada – but with important distinctions, not least the evident influence of the French ‘Nouveaux Réalistes’, including Arman, César and Daniel Spoerri. Both his spatial works and his graphic sheets are structured through the principle of collage, bringing together a wide range of elements, materials and textures. The found object is taken up by the artist stripped of its original meaning, treated instead as pure form, almost as though it were paint. Wood often serves as both the material and conceptual foundation of these works, including timber that has already passed through various stages of use. Upon the surface of a plank, the artist constructs geometric forms, from which a multilayered relief saturated with numerous details gradually emerges.

Khvostenko’s way of thinking is fundamentally sculptural: “They recently brought me several fragments that I could incorporate into my sculptures – some carved boards, driftwood; I myself have found a few rusty pieces of iron. My primary work is sculpture, not works on paper. Sculpture is my profession. I work constantly on paper, but for me it is a run-up, a dash toward sculpture,” he said in an interview.

Within Khvostenko’s collage-objects, powerful dynamic relationships are at work, often traced by graphic lines that evoke the strings of a guitar. Since the early days of Cubism, musical instruments – particularly the violin and the guitar – had served as models for the analysis and synthesis of form in the paintings and collages of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Juan Gris (1887–1927), and subsequently for many other artists. In Khvostenko’s objects, the outlines of a guitar neck and tuning pegs repeatedly emerge: he stretches strings, builds the composition through clear linear structures, and “tunes” it, achieving a harmonious resonance.

These works resemble potential musical instruments: they invite the production of sound and seem almost literally ready to become participants in a kind of “noise orchestra”. This interweaving of artistic forms – the continuation and reflection of one creative practice within another – comes naturally to an artist of a Renaissance cast like Khvostenko.