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Andakulova Gallery — gallery cover

DIFCDubai

Andakulova Gallery

Artists, curatorial team, advisors, and partners connected to Andakulova Gallery.

Artists

Represented and guest artists exhibiting with the gallery.

Andrey Krikis

Andrey Krikis

Represented Artist

Andrey Krikis was born in Yaroslavl, Russia in 1950 and studied at the Yaroslavl Institute of Art from 1972 to 1976. He spent most of his working life in Uzbekistan — in Samarkand and Tashkent — where he became known among artists and collectors as the "King of Colour" for his sustained, intuitive engagement with pigment and form. He moved from academic figuration toward bold abstract expressionism, developing a visual language rooted in the colour and atmosphere of Central Asia rather than its iconography. Samarkand enters his paintings as sensation rather than subject. He exhibited widely during his lifetime: solo exhibitions in Tashkent, Samarkand and Moscow; group shows in Greece, Mongolia, India, Bangladesh, Germany, Sweden, France, South Korea and the United States; and a solo presentation in San Francisco in 1993. He died in 1994 at the age of 44. Posthumous exhibitions have been held at the Academy of Art of Uzbekistan, organised with support from the Swiss Bureau of Development and Cooperation.

Founders

Gallery founders and founding directors.

Natalya Andakulova

Natalya Andakulova

Founder

Natalya Andakulova grew up in Samarkand — the Silk Road city whose name alone carries the weight of several centuries of cultural exchange. She studied mathematics and physics at the Navoi Institute, earned a bachelor's and then a master's degree, and then decided she was not cut out for a career in science. Art had been pulling at her since a childhood visit to a museum in Tashkent, where the colours and patterns of Central Asian art settled into her imagination and never left. She trained as an art historian, moved to Dubai, and in 2012 opened Andakulova Gallery in DIFC — the only gallery in the city dedicated exclusively to contemporary art from Central Asia. The decision was as much structural as it was personal: Central Asian artists had almost no representation in the global market, no foothold in the Gulf, no institutional advocates in the region. She became all three simultaneously. For over a decade she has been travelling back to Tashkent, Almaty and across the five countries of Central Asia to find artists whose work deserves a wider audience and whose traditions — rooted in Soviet-era art education, Islamic ornamental culture, Silk Road iconography — carry something that the Dubai art market had not seen. She has published a monograph on artist Bakhodir Jalal — A Line to Eternity — with Skira Publications. She has collaborated with the Tashkent Biennale and with Dubai-based art platforms. She has built an educational programme at the gallery that runs drawing workshops and lectures on Islamic art alongside the exhibition calendar. Twelve years in, the gallery represents over twenty artists and the research is continuous.