PARIS—Thirty canvases by Oleg Tselkov, 73, are on sale through May 15 at Galerie Le Minotaure, in Paris, where the Moscow-born artist has lived since 1977. Prices run from €40,000 to €200,000 ($61,400–307,200). Last June, when his 1980 oil Five Faces, depicting purple masks of diminishing size, fetched £223,000 ($440,900) at MacDougalls, in London, Tselkov became the third most expensive Russian artist alive. He’s come a long way from his early years as a penniless self-proclaimed anarchist who was kicked out of art schools in Minsk and St. Petersburg and, ultimately, expelled from the Soviet Union itself. “I detested the Communists and opted to live outside the system,” he explains. “I lived on a knife edge.” The disturbing visages that dominate his boldly hued works echo his childhood memories of Stalin’s attempts to “turn the Soviet people into obedient cogs.”

"Face Painting" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.