Aleksandr Tyshler was born in Melitopol, Ukraine, in 1898. He studied at the Kiev Academy of Art from 1912 to 1917 and soon became a member of the Moscow Society of Easel Painters (OST). During that period he was heavily influenced by the Suprematist works of Kazimir Malevich and by Constructivism. From the 1930s to the 1950s Tyshler completely switched over to stage art. Beginning in the 1960s Tyshler became a living symbol of resistance to apologetic Soviet culture. His artistic system as well as his personality significantly influenced the development of alternative art in the post-Stalinist period. He had enough courage to preserve and develop the best traditions of the early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde in opposition to the pressure of the Stalinist regime.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Tyshler devoted a great deal of time to painting and graphic arts and created a unique series of works within which a person is transformed into an actor while the scenery, in turn, acquires human form. In the last decade of his career he began to work in sculpture, creating branches of trees that resembled feminine figures, guardians of the forest. Tyshler died in Moscow in 1980.