Rustam Khalfin is a bright representative of avant-garde art, one of the first postmodernists in Kazakhstan, the initiator of such forms of modern art as an object (in the style of a "finished object"), installation, performance; a pioneer of Kazakhstani video art. Being the author and participant of many curatorial projects, he influenced the formation of the work of "relevant" artists both in the Central Asian region and beyond.
Rustam Khalfin was born on October 14, 1949, in Tashkent in the family of front-line soldier Nurmukhamed Abdrakhmanovich Khalfin. From 1950 to 2007 he lived and worked in Alma-Ata.
In 1972 he graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute.
"I started with Corbusier. His words that through one still life you can convey the idea of the whole world have become key for me and my creativity. I started studying in Alma-Ata and transferred to the Moscow Architectural Institute in the third year.
My real passion for painting began in 1985. I have just arrived from Leningrad, where I studied under the guidance of Gennady Zubkov on the Sterligov system. After returning to Alma-Ata, he began to conduct classes right at home. This is normal. Borya Yakub, Sasha Rorokin, Ablay Karpykov, and Nazipa Nedelova also went. There was a certain program developed by Sterligov in 1926 in Ginhuk.
The technique has been worked out. Three ways of shaping: division, molding, shape makes shape. If Sterligov took the cup-dome system based on Christianity as the basis of his work, then I would like to take the nomad culture as a basis and create something of my own. And I already know what can be taken as its basis. But I would like to emphasize that I am not concerned about the opposition, but about the contact of these traditions and the mutual complementarity of each other. If Sterligov took a sacred, I emphasize, dome, then we have a yurt, an ordinary nomad's house. And the concept of a bowl in his cup-dome system corresponds to a bowl."
From 1972 to 1983, Rustam Khalfin worked at the design institutes of Alma-Ata and, at the same time engaged in painting. Since 1983, devoting himself entirely to art, he turned to the traditions of abstractionism and the Russian avant-garde. From painting to pencil drawing, Halfin moves on to photography, object, installation, and video.
Since 1995, Halfin has worked in the direction of postmodernism, as a conceptual artist, he carried out his activities in the framework of major art projects, such as "Eurasian Utopia", "Clay Project", in the video art "Northern Barbarians".
In 1998 he created a group of artists "Zero Level", and at about the same time he was the organizer and director of his gallery of contemporary art "Look", until 2001. The "clay project" occupied both floors of the "LOOK" gallery: on the ground floor there is a huge figure of a man, he is so huge that one knee and an arm seem to pierce the ceiling and protrude on the clay floor of the second floor.
"This is one of my best works. The figure of the dismembered hero is a metaphor for the disunity of people in today's world and, in particular, our artistic community. She called for consolidation, reflection on the situation, and the development of a strategy that could adequately present Kazakhstan to the international cultural community."
In 2005, Halfin's works were exhibited in the Central Asia Pavilion at the prestigious Venice Biennale, when Kazakh contemporary art was first presented in the world.
Rustam's wife and his muse is the artist Lydia Blinova, with whom Halfin regularly held apartment exhibitions.
Rustam Khalfin created the concept of "emptiness" – a combination of emptiness and completeness at the same time. This word is called a simple plastic object formed between fingers clenched into a fist – it does not matter if it is made of air or a lump of clay.
Today there are more than 200 works that are part of the heritage of Rustam Khalfin: paintings, installations, drawings, photographs, texts, and much more.
His works are kept in the State Tretyakov Gallery (Russia), Zimmerly-Museum of Nonconformist Art in New Jersey (USA), MuHKA Museum of Modern Art (Belgium), A. Kasteev State Museum of Art.
