Saken Gumarov. Unsolved Thought Forms
The artist Saken Gumarov was often referred to as a prophet, even during his lifetime. A mystic, philosopher and a Sufi, he sought the spiritual essence in everything. His great friend, the poet Vladislav Irkhin, described his paintings as radiating grace, enchantment and perfect joy.
Gumarov has often been compared to Wassily Kandinsky and Sergei Kalmykov. They shared a similar empathy with humanity, were poetic by nature but also very determined. Their paintings were filled with light and yet their lives were complicated, as artists’ often are, and we are left with a sense that there is still much about their work to explore and understand.
People now say that Gumarov was ahead of his time. For much of his life his paintings were neither understood nor accepted as they did not reflect Soviet ideology. He was seen as strange and rebellious and, as his wife later recalled, some people scoffed at his paintings and called them childish daubs. Many people thought he was disconnected from reality.
Fortunately for us, despite this reaction, Gumarov kept working in private and developing his expressive style of painting. At the same time he was busy with other aspects of his life. He was a gifted and versatile person who worked as a journalist and producer for a local television station. As an actor he performed on stage as well as writing poetry and establishing a puppet show for television. He played the dombra, read the Koran in Arabic and Farsi, and studied various spiritual and philosophic teachings. His contemporaries remember him as a well-read and educated person with an inquisitive mind. He never parted with books by his favourite authors: Radlov, Zatayevich, Abay, Gumilyov, Shakarim Kudiberdiev, Gumilyov and Wassily Kandinsky.
Saken Gumarov was born and grew up in the Bokey Orda district in the west of Kazakhstan. His mother died in childbirth and he was fostered by the family of his paternal uncle. He developed his love of art as a child and by the 1950s was producing large
abstract paintings. However, for the greater part of his life he was known not as an artist but as a producer at Uralsk TV, which was the first in the region to put out live broadcasts of theatrical performances.
All his life he was linked, in one way or another, to the theatre: his father was also an actor and a producer. Gumarov studied to be a director at Moscow’s GITIS and St Petersburg’s LGITMIK. He worked at Uralsk TV for many years and was a member of the USSR Union of Journalists.
Interestingly, it was not in his own country that he first gained recognition as an artist but in Kyiv where he held his debut exhibition in 1990, at the age of 53. The Ukrainians gave him a warm reception and he found many friends and followers there.
He only became famous in the last five years of his life. In these years, between 1990 and 1995, he held around 40 exhibitions in galleries in Kyiv, Moscow, Budapest, Vilnius, Almaty, Crimea, Sochi, Yekaterinburg, Jūrmala and Uralsk. He died in 1995.
His works have continued to be exhibited since his death. The famous Miro Gallery in Prague hosted an exhibition in 2002 dedicated to two Kazakh artists: the landscape painter Zhanatai Shardenov and Abstractionist Saken Gumarov. An exhibition was held in the Hungarian town of Karcag in
1996 because Saken Gumarov had met Jozsef Torma, a specialist in Turkic philology who at that time was the Hungarian ambassador in Kazakhstan. Impressed by his paintings, Torma promised to exhibit Gumarov’s works in Hungary, but in the end the exhibition was held after the artist had died. Torma visited his grave in Uralsk and the Saken Gumarov Museum, and met his family. Following Gumarov’s death his studio, in the city where he had lived and worked, was turned into a museum, and the city also named an art school after him.
Art critics are quite ambiguous about the style of Saken Gumarov. Some define him as avant-garde and abstract, others think he was a post avant-gardist. In Ukraine he is credited with being the founder of a new movement called Attractivism.
The artist himself preferred to call his paintings ‘thought forms’, and each one of them uses a special code that it is up to us to interpret. Symbols, images, underlying themes – this is the language of his creative work. He also loved saying that aruakhs (spirits of dead ancestors in Tengriism) would lead his hand
when he painted. His friends believed he had extrasensory perception.
They claimed that he could see into the future and that his paintings reflected events that had not yet taken place.
I would like to add that I met the artist myself at the beginning of the 1990s. The paintings he exhibited at the House of Scientists in Almaty stayed in my mind for a long time afterwards. We met in person and after this meeting, a friend of mine agreed (we were then students) that we should introduce him to our meditation teacher as we thought they would find they had a lot in common. When they met the two so clearly shared the same language we felt a sense of joy for having been able to bring them together.
Saken Gumarov was modest and laconic, but he radiated the delicate charm of a person with a noble soul and a loving heart. There was never a shadow of the prosaic or philistine about him. He lived with his spirit, dreamed of great ideas and illuminated all those around him with his quiet inner light. He was a very special person, and his incredible paintings are testimony to this.