Vladimir Yankilevsky was born in 1938 in Moscow. Like many of his fellow artists, he studied at the Moscow Secondary Art School. After graduating from the Moscow Institute of Graphic Arts in 1962 he immediately joined the Moscow artistic underground and became a prominent figure. His early compositions, created in the late 1950s, reveal the search for a personal philosophy and the development of the fundamental traditions of Western European culture. The scope of the artist’s interests includes ancient Egyptian and Mexican art as well as the innovations of Paul Klee and Joan Miró. His art objects and monumental compositions (triptychs) have a specific dynamic internal structure. They expose the world layer by layer, and every part of the composition has its own meaning and value.
In the 1960s Yankilevsky joined an artistic circle to which Sooster and Kabakov also belonged. Later it formed the core of the Sretensky Boulevard Group. Yankilevsky’s work was shown in the famous exhibition at the Manezh in 1962, which was visited by Khrushchev. He also participated in the 1975 Twenty Moscow Artists exhibit of unofficial art. Since that time he has exhibited his work in Europe, the United States, and Japan, and in 1987 was given a large retrospective show in Moscow. Yankilevsky lives in Paris and New York.