Viktor Sergeyevich Shlyundin was born in 1947 in the village of Khmelyovka near Kostroma. In 1970, he graduated from the Faculty of Art and Graphics of the Nekrasov Kostroma State Pedagogical Institute.
During his studies, Viktor Shlyundin joined a “resistance art group” that protested against the officially approved art movement — socialist realism. At the faculty, he learned artistic secrets from his beloved teacher Fyodor Yakovlevich Korablyov.
Viktor Shlyundin was inspired by Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, the “knight of fairy-tale miracles” Yefim Vasilyevich Chestnyakov and many other geniuses of the 20th century. From 1985, Viktor Shlyundin participated in exhibitions that took place in Kostroma, Yaroslavl, and Moscow; his works were exhibited in Poland and Malta.
Collage was Viktor Shlyundin’s favorite technique of art creation. The artist used a variety of materials: paper, cardboard, thread, buttons, and fabrics. Such works revealed his boundless imagination and wit. At the same time, they were always tasteful and distinguished by Shlyundin’s sense of proportion.
Another important direction in Shlyundin’s oeuvre was his work on the “artist’s book”. For Shlyundin, the elaboration of the content, illustrations and all other elements was a kind of testing ground for artistic experiments, where his imagination and temperament could be fully manifested both in the image and the chosen techniques.
When working on the book’s design, he used a variety of techniques: free figurative drawing, monotyping, applique, photography and collage. For such experiments, he opted for texts, in which ambiguity, uncertainty and metaphor played a significant role. Authors close to him in spirit were Guillaume Apollinaire, Joseph Brodsky and, of course, the master of the absurd Daniil Ivanovich Kharms.
Viktor Shlyundin’s collage “Self-Portrait of Kharms” included elements of book art. The artist cut out Kharms’s profile in a sheet of plywood, into which he inscribed an excerpt from the poet’s own writing.
The Kostroma artist
recalled,
