Evgenii Rukhin was born in 1943 in Saratov. He studied at Leningrad University and attended Vera Mukhina’s courses at the Institute of Art in Leningrad. His first compositions date back to 1963.
In the early 1970s Rukhin met Rabin and Nemukhin, who considerably influenced his artistic system. Together with Rabin, Rukhin was among those who organized the famous Bulldozer Exhibition in Moscow in 1974. There he was arrested by the KGB. Rukhin quickly became one of the leaders of Leningrad underground culture. He introduced concepts of Pop Art into his paintings and worked in the genres of assemblage and installation.
His first personal exhibitions were organized in the United States at the Betty Parsons Gallery (New York, 1966), the North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh, 1975), and the Philips Collection (Washington, D.C., 1976). Rukhin often used pieces of furniture and frames in his objects, and many of his compositions borrow the structure of the Russian icon. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg became his favorite artists Evgenii Rukhin met an untimely death in 1976 under tragic circumstances when a fire broke out in his studio.