Elbey Rzaquliyev

June 17, 1926 (age 81)

Baku, Azerbaijan

Elbey Rzaquliyev started his career at the Azerbaijanfilm studio (then named after Jafar Jabbarly) which staff he joined after he graduated from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in 1953. He made a great number of sketches of sets, costumes and scenes, and worked on a visual style of many trademark Azerbaijani movies, including ‘Black Rocks’, ‘Telephone Girl’, ‘Arshin Mai Alan’, and ‘Sevil’ among others. Six years after, Rzaquliyev made his first working trip abroad, to Mexico, with a group of great figures of Soviet culture, like Konstantin Simonov, Sergey Gerasimov, Sergey Mikhalkov, Grigory Kuznetsov, and Alexander Zakhri. It was a great opportunity for the artist to explore the culture of a distant country, its traditions and peculiarities as well as to communicate with the representatives of the local art. While on the two-week trip, Rzaquliyev absorbed cultural heritage and the modern life of the country creating many sketches, drafts, watercolours, and studies. On his return, all the works were united in the exhibition called ‘Impressions of Mexico’ which was shown in 1960 in Baku, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. During the next ten years, the artist worked hard both in fine art and cinema. It was the turbulent creative period in his life full of fruitful work, researches, and great achievements. Rzaquliyev participated in the decoration of national exhibition pavilions abroad and the republic’s museums as well. At the beginning of the 1960s, he produced a triptych ‘Alibayramli Hydroelectric Power Station’. Although it was focused on the socialist theme, Rzaquliyev managed to depart from the formal stereotypes of the genre and to present his own interpretation of the topic. He combined a feeling of stop-motion illustration to the soviet monumental art. In 1961, the artist presented his canvases at the exhibition of Young Soviet Artists in Paris. The period was also full of the foreign business trips in which he experimented with different techniques, including watercolor, pencil, pastel, marker, oil and tempera, and genres, like etude, sketch, draft, prepared canvas, and picture. The artist reflected in his works the individual details, the images and everyday scenes he observed while traveling, and created the true portraits of the countries he visited. The series Rzaquliyev created during his trip around Arab east area is considered as his most successful works, especially those he brought from Yemen, Syria, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The audience had a possibility to contemplate the masterpieces from the Eastern Countries at the solo show organized in 1965. Two years later, the artist designed the Azerbaijan Pavilion at International and Universal Exposition or Expo-67 held in Montreal, Canada. By the 1970s, Rzaquliyev elaborated his individual and recognizable style. Replying to the dominant topic of the time, the Great Patriotic, the artist created such notable works like ‘Revolutionary Baku’ and ‘Icheri Sheher’ series, and a painting ‘Victory Day 1945’. Several canvases in the strict portrait genre which presented the eminent personalities from different spheres of Azerbaijani life, like Uzeyir Hajibeyov or Mirza Alakbar Sabir, were also among the works of the period. Rzaquliyev combined his artistic activity with the social one working for the development and popularization of national heritage. From 1977 to 1987, he served as a Secretary of the Board of the Azerbaijan Artists’ Union. He also occupied the same post at the Azerbaijan Cinematographers Union. During the course of his career, Elbey Rzaquliyev had a lot of exhibitions which differed in their basis and included the individual shows organized after the working trips, or the group presentations abroad where he met the viewers with the beauty of his homeland. So, in 1982 he exhibited his artworks along with cinema artist N. in Budapest. The solo show organized seven years later at the Central House of Artists in Moscow. It found a great resonance and received positive reviews from professional critics. Broken after the death of his beloved wife in 1990, Elbey Rzaquliyev abandoned the social life and turned to symbolic still-lifes which expressed his sorrow through the depictions of flowers in a generalized and expressive palette. Contrary to his early works, the canvases were deprived of details. In 2006, Azerbaijan National Museum of Art organized a huge retrospective of Rzaguliyev’s to commemorate his 80th anniversary.

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