Haralampi G. Oroschakoff

He spent three months with Rudolf Hausner as guest auditor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, then continued as autodidact, dividing his time between Cannes, New York City, Geneva and Cologne.

That same Munich, trapped in its smug beauty and dulled by navel-gazing, where, at the beginning of the 20th century, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky and the Dalmatian Greek and self-made Italian Giorgio de Chirico lead the first battles for a modern conception of values and the world – and at the end of a century, in which we were turned into emigrants, shoved back and forth like furniture in abandoned rooms.

"[11] His early works were influenced by his Viennese past: changing schools, speechlessness and isolation, simultaneously the material and social ascent of his family.

It resulted in a series of pictures with an independent approach to the development of monochrome painting, denoting the invisible cultural boundary between the post-Latin West and the post-Byzantine East.

[14] "His deliberate and positive inclusion of diverse fragments from the Slavic-Russian and Asia Minor realms and the attempt to develop a new and contemporary iconography clearly show that Oroschakoff's intention is to shift the emphasis – not for sentimental love of his roots, but for his belief that the East has preserved a cultural vitality which has long been buried in the West.

Friendship developed with representatives of the local avant-garde of the time, such as Boris Groys, IRWIN, Andrei Filippov, Yuri Albert, Vadim Zahkarov and Luchezar Boyadjiev.

[17] Since 2008, he has been working on his Gesamtkunstwerk "Musée d'Art et de Lettre", a search for traces reaching back, conceptually, to 1979 joining together diverse means of expression, techniques and materials in order to create an experiential space.

The early installation Dandolo (Museum Fridericianum in Kassel 1989; Kunstverein Göttingen in 1989; Staatsgalerie Moderne Kunst in Munich 1990), which dealt with the destruction of Constantinople by the crusaders, caused a big controversy in the German art scene.

"[23] The installation found a more positive response in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "Oroschakoff – and this makes him a role model for many whose cultural identity has been dramatically upset by the opening of the Eastern bloc – has learned how to own up to his ambivalence.

"[24] Elke Schmitter wrote about Oroschakoff in Der Spiegel in 2002: "(...) the image of the angry young man, exotically enhanced by ostentatious dandyism and foreign origin.

"[25] In 2018, in the bi-monthly magazine CATO, Thomas Fasbender stated: „Unlike Kazimir Malevich, who attacked head-on, complemented and overcame modern thought with the monochrome square, Oroschakoff, in the patriarchal cross, leaves it behind like a dog that barks as the caravan moves on and into the beyond.