Selected Works

A Curatorial Selection Across Four Periods

Boris Uan-Zo-li was an aerospace power electronics engineer in Moscow, the author of 165 patents, and a professional artist with a second Master's degree in art. He painted at night for forty years. The work here runs from the late 1970s to the present: portraits made when the wrong subject could cost a man his career, cities built out of flat planes and hard color, and late canvases painted in Oregon in his late seventies and eighties.

USSR — Under Constraints (Pre-Perestroika)

Tight paintings, compressed space, color held back. In these years the choice of subject was itself the risk: writers the state had shot, poets it had banned, names still awkward to say aloud. The restraint in these canvases is an engineer's, and a careful man's.

Andrey Sakharov, 1982

Boris painted Sakharov while the physicist was still free, and had the canvas carried to his Moscow apartment by Vadim and Zarina, friends from the dissident circle. In January 1980 Sakharov was sent into internal exile in Gorky, held under guard and force-fed through his hunger strikes. This canvas is the second version, painted afterward.

Isaac Babel, 1979

Babel was a Jew from Odessa, as was the painter's father. The NKVD shot him in 1940, and for four decades afterward his name was awkward to say aloud. Painting him in 1979 was not a neutral choice of subject.

Bulat Okudzhava, 1983

Okudzhava's songs played on Soviet television; his mother had been imprisoned in a forced-labor camp, alongside the painter's mother-in-law. The two women knew each other well. This portrait comes out of that proximity, not out of fame.

Self-Portrait, 1980

Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1987

Perestroika and Early 1990s — Transitional Expansion

After 1985 the rules loosened, and you can watch it happen on the canvas. The paintings get larger and the color stops apologizing. Subjects that could not have hung in the same room a few years earlier now sit side by side.

Vladimir Lenin, 1986

Not homage. Lenin is painted as a propaganda poster and deliberately as a false one — the totalitarian image quoting itself. In 1986 the joke still carried a risk.

Self-Portrait, 1991

The Soviet Union ended that year. The painter looks out cheerfully — a Soviet intellectual out from under the thing that had shaped his entire working life.

Mikhail Bulgakov, 1991

John the Baptist, 1990

Post-Soviet Period — Architectural Synthesis (1992–2010)

Boris turned from faces to cities: Vienna, Paris, Moscow. They are built the way a schematic is built — flat planes, hard edges, color doing structural work instead of decoration. The engineer never left the painter alone.

View from Our Window, 1994

Not an imagined city. This is the actual view from the kitchen window of the family's Moscow apartment.

City of Paris, 1999

A reworking of Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, rebuilt in flat planes and hard color. Boris considers it one of the best paintings he has made.

Gates to Paradise, 1995

Big City, 1996

A Lonely Man with a Cat in Paris, 1993

Old Vienna, 1996

16th Century Englishman, 1998

Late Works — Interior Expansion and Chromatic Clarity (2010–Present)

Boris emigrated to the United States in 2010, at seventy-two, and settled in Oregon. Everything in this section was painted there, in his late seventies and eighties — the most open work of his life: wide interiors, arches, city views with air in them. He is eighty-eight now and his sight is failing. These were made while that was closing in.

Ancient Rome, 2017

New York City, 2017

Greek Soldier, 2019

Portrait of an Englishman, 2016

Bob Dylan, 2015