Fazil Najafov is one of the most prominent representatives of contemporary Azerbaijani sculpture, mostly known for his dramatic and psychologically charged works.
Background
Fazil Najafov was born on February 16, 1935, in Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic (present-day Baku, Azerbaijan). Before Fazil's birth, his family experienced difficult times. They lived during the period of time when dispossession, one of the most important and prioritized activities of the Bolshevik government, was carried out in the form of a total "expropriation" campaign and many families were left in the street, deprived of even basic things. These events hit the family of the artist's grandfather, who was a middle-scale merchant, dealing with the fur trade.
Education
In 1950, Fazil entered the Department of Sculpture at the Azim Azimzade Art School in Baku. Fazil's first teacher was Fuad Abdurahmanov, a sculptor. When he was a sophomore, he studied under the guidance of Salim Guliyev. Salim's contribution to the development of Najafov as a sculptor can be hardly overestimated. The sculpture techniques, sense of scale, the issue of figure completeness - all of these things were acquired by young Fazil from his favorite teacher. Fundamentals of the sculptural design were taught to Fazil Najafov by Andrew Drevin.
In 1955, Najafov finished the Azim Azimzade Art School and the same year, he enrolled in the Surikov Moscow State Academic Art Institute, leaving the educational establishment in 1961. While working on his diploma, he created a composition, dedicated to the oilmen labor. This topic was extremely popular in those years not only among Azerbaijani artists. However, the sculptural composition, created by an excellent student Fazil Najafov, caused not only criticism, but also provoked outright irritation of teachers due to this euphoria, that prevailed among the followers of the "severe style", and among the Azerbaijani students and recent graduates in particular.
Fazil's graduation work literally shocked his mentor, Nikolai Vasilyevich Tomsky, a respectful sculptor, who, in his lifetime, received many national awards and prizes. Clearly understanding the value of the proposed design and the originality of its author, he, in order to avoid a scandal, simply advised his honorable student to completely destroy this work. Fazil didn't receive a diploma, because, in the examination committee's opinion, his work failed to meet ideological and academic standards.
Career
After a failed attempt to defend his diploma work, Fazil came back to his native Baku. There, he was allocated to the studio space, where he could work freely, implementing his bold ideas, the thing he couldn't do in Moscow, where artists' rights were violated by the ideology of the soviet government. In those years, namely the end of the 1950's-early 1960's, a certain group of artists formed in Baku. These were like-minded people, who entirely devoted themselves to artistic experimentation, the development of the actual language of art. Shape, as a set of different means of artistic expression, became the center of attraction of creative energy. The young talented sculptor, Fazil, became spoken about - his works aroused interest and he was recognized in intellectual circles.
Since 1960, Najafov has taken part in local and international exhibitions. Between 1963 and 1970, he acted as a chairman of the Sculpture Unit at the Artists Union of the Azerbaijan SSR. Also, between 1965 and 1970, Fazil was a member of the State Commission of Experts at the Ministry of Culture of the Azerbaijan SSR. In 1975, he was made a member of the Monuments Receipt State Commission at the Ministry of Culture of the Azerbaijan SSR, where he remained till 1985.
In 1970, Fazil was offered to perform the sculptural decoration of the façade of the House of Actors. However, after the sculpture was erected, Fazil was attacked for being too "formalistic". The sculpture was promptly removed and Fazil had to write an "explanation" of what he had done. He was blacklisted and spent many of the following years in disgrace. Even his close friends avoided him. Later, at the Tbilisi Biennial Art Exhibition in 1986, he was awarded the Grand Prize for being the "Most Disgraced of the Most Talented Artists".
Currently, Fazil lives and works in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Views
Yet with his early works, Fazil declared himself to be an exceptional, independent-minded sculptor. He repeatedly had to deal with the lack of understanding and sometimes total rejection of his works by the political system as ideologically inadequate. All of these things developed the artist's immunity, making him a philosopher. Prone to philosophical analysis, alien to secular vanity, the sculptor actively addresses the various cultural layers of ancient civilizations.
Through images of a human, Fazil transfers his sense of harmony or disharmony with the environment, his agreement or disagreement with the actual state of things, his joy and pain. By his works, Najafov wants to express deep philosophical concepts.
Working with a variety of materials, such as stone, marble, bronze and granite, Najafov always seeks to maximize the identification of their expressive possibilities.
The master always chooses difficult, uncomfortable postures for his characters. And this creates internal stress - state, bordering between peace and dynamics. Facial expressions are created according to subtle psychological nuances.
Quotations:
"I have always been sensitive to stone. It seems, that I understand the nature of stone and, in turn, it understands me, too. Stone retains the memory of millions of years, guarding the secrets of time deep inside it. With stone you can create something monumental, something eternal; you're not dealing with cardboard. In a single word, I love stone. I like bronze, too, but nothing attracts me as much as the expressive monumental silence of stone."