BOOK: Yusef Szafki - Paintings

Accompaying book for the exhibition 'Flaunting Szafki: A retrospective of paintings by Yusef Szafki'. 

Born and raised in Glasgow, the only child of a Russian emigre, Szafki was much influenced by literature in his visual artwork. In an endlessly creative life, he published two literary works, including one on engaging with the Russian/Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol (60’ N (1996) ). Arguably the bold dreamlike, exaggerated style of Szafki’s work is influenced heavily by Gogol’s character, and his writing in such famous stories as ‘Diary of a Madman’ and ‘The Nose’.

The title of this exhibition Flaunting Szafki draws on and adapts from one of the pieces Szafki published in his own collection of stories Helsinki (Not the Town) (1995), and it encapsulates something of the boldness and the joie-de-vivre we see in the themes and subject matter of his paintings.

65 pages with over high resolution colour reproductions of Szafki's paintings.