Ivan Chuikov created the painting “The Great Bather” in 1969. The work combines elements of painting and sculpture. The lower half consists of a wooden box with a woman’s thigh and breasts — these elements are made of pressed beige paper. The front wall features blue sea waves in a poster-like style.

The upper part is an oil painting. It features the bather’s head and leg, and behind there is an abstract landscape reminiscent of the seashore.

The bather is a popular subject, which was addressed by many Russian and foreign artists: Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Boris Kustodiev, Thomas Couture and others. The painters often depicted women on the shore of a lake, river or sea, surrounded by trees and shrubs or strong waves.

Ivan Chuikov created his own version of the classic theme. In his work, the artist combined painting and sculpture, different volumes, textures, perspectives and materials. Half of the bather’s body is voluminous and grainy, it consists of pressed paper, and the other one is a flat schematic painting. Researchers compare the composition of “The Great Bather” to a box with an open lid, which is slightly inclined and can shut at any moment.

Contrasts in materials and technique symbolized the duality of a work of art, the difference between how a woman’s body looks in life, how it is depicted on canvas and how the viewer sees it. Chuikov believed that there is no objective perception — everyone understands the work in their own way. He wrote,

Ivan Chuikov was born in 1935 in Moscow. He was a representative of “Moscow Conceptualism” — an unofficial movement in Soviet and Russian art. The artists of this circle wondered what art was. To answer this question, they used different means: painting, sculpture, photography and text.

Since the 1980s, Chuikov began to work with a new technique — fragmentation. He depicted parts of an object or borrowed elements from other works. The artist wrote,