Lekim Ibragimov

Lekim Ibragimov was born on 21 December 1944 in the village of Maly Dekhan, in the Uyghur district of Kazakhstan’s Almaty region, into a teacher’s family; he is of Uyghur origin. From 1964 to 1971 he studied at the Gogol Art College in Alma-Ata, then moved to Tashkent and studied in the graphics department of the Ostrovsky Theatre and Art Institute until 1977.

He began to take part in republican, all-Union and international exhibitions while still a student, in 1976. In 1978 he was admitted to the USSR Union of Artists; from 1978 to 1986 he worked in a studio at the Senezh artists’ creative house and in studios in the Baltic states. He is also a member of the Union of Artists of Uzbekistan.

In 1998 Ibragimov was a delegate to the World Congress of Artists in Paris and received the gold medal of the Academy of Arts of Uzbekistan. In 1999 he was elected a full member (academician) of the Academy and became a professor at the Kamoliddin Behzod National Institute of Arts and Design. In 2001 he won the jury’s grand prize at the first Tashkent Biennale of Contemporary Art and was named People’s Painter of Uzbekistan.

His work joins painting, graphics and calligraphy, Eastern and Western cultural heritage, modernism and poetic symbolism. His trademark is an angel, or several angels, in almost every painting. A book of his poems was published in Switzerland in 1997. The writer Chingiz Aitmatov was his friend: in 2008 Ibragimov dedicated to his memory the solo exhibition “Abduction of Asia” at the Zurab Tsereteli Art Gallery in Moscow, and that year he became an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts.

His principal project is “A Thousand Angels and One Painting”. The idea came in 2000 from the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, and work began in 2010. The canvas is made of a thousand separate canvases, is 8 metres high and 66 metres long, and covers more than 500 square metres. It was shown in Prague (2012), Moscow (2013) and Tashkent (2014); at the Moscow show the Interrekord agency registered two world records. His works are held in museums in Moscow, Tashkent, Budapest, Novosibirsk and Almaty and in many private collections around the world.