Malik Nabiyev

Malik Nabiyev was born on 1 May 1916 in Tashkent. He had his first drawing lessons from the painter Bahrom Hamdamiy. From 1933 to 1937 he studied at the Tashkent art college; in 1934 the satirical artist Vohid Odilov took him to the editorial office of the magazine “Mushtum”, where he received an assignment from Abdulla Qodiriy and had a drawing of railway workers’ life published. At about the same time he began teaching drawing at a school in Sebzor.

After graduating in 1937 he stayed on as a teacher at the college and worked there until 1958. In 1938 he was admitted to the Union of Artists of Uzbekistan and took a two-year course for young artists taught by P. Benkov, A. Matveev, V. Yeremyan and others; in 1939 he spent two and a half months on a training course at the Repin Academy of Arts in Leningrad.

In 1957 he enrolled in the correspondence department of the art and graphics faculty of the Nizami Tashkent State Pedagogical Institute and graduated in 1962. He taught at the institute from 1958, headed its painting department from 1963 to 1988 and was a professor from 1973. He worked there until the end of his life and wrote textbooks and teaching aids on the teaching of drawing.

Nabiyev worked mainly in portraiture and historical painting. Among his known works are “Portrait of a Friend” (1933), “The Uprising Suppressed” (1940), “The Uprising of Spitamenes against the Macedonians” (1960), portraits of Abu Rayhan al-Biruni and Babur, and of contemporaries such as the teacher M. Goipova and the People’s Artist Hasanov. He visited more than forty countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas and painted studies and finished canvases from his trips to India, Cuba, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Although he studied many trends of world art, he remained faithful to the realist tradition.

In the years of independence he painted portraits of Babur, Fitrat and Usmon Nosir; his portrait of Amir Temur, painted in 1994, won wide recognition, and he returned to the subject in later years. Some of his works are held in museums and private collections in Russia, Finland, Norway, Belgium, France, Japan and other countries.

In 1968 Nabiyev was named Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR, and in 1992 People’s Artist of Uzbekistan. In 1997 he became an academician of the Academy of Arts of Uzbekistan, and in 2000 he received the Order “For Outstanding Merit”. He died in Tashkent in 2008. A memorial evening marked the 95th anniversary of his birth in 2011, and a solo exhibition was held at the Academy of Arts’ Central Exhibition Hall in 2016; his son Khusan and grandson Anvar are artists too.