“It is foolish to change the vector of chaos. You shouldn’t try to control it, but fall into it.”

Gueorgui Pinkhassov has a singular vision – his richly coloured, multi-layered photographs are distinct microcosms that embrace the visual complexity of contemporary life. He is an artist working with photography and within Magnum’s documentary tradition. The purity of his approach, a visual stream of consciousness inspired both by his early mentor, the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovski, and Magnum’s founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, has led fellow Magnum photographers to herald him a genius of the medium.

For this, Gueorgui Pinkhassov’s first commercial exhibition in London, Magnum presents a career overview of key colour works from the early 1990s to the present day. Prints such as Balcony of a hotel, Andalucia, from 1993, show his mastery of colour and reflection – so often in Pinkhassov’s images scenes are glimpsed through, or reflected onto, surfaces – as in this case, on the shiny metalic surface of a lift. Bold scenes encapsulate his flare for light and shade, such as the early image of a cockerel from Uzbekhistan, 1992 or flowers photographed in a Moscow underpass, 2002, in which details appear spot lit or emerge from a halo of light. An inclination for “all over” compositions, such as that created by a matrix of wires in Fish Market, Jakarta, 2013, and unusual focal points, disrupts the instant accessibility of Pinkhassov’s subject matter - these are images to come back to again and again – absorbing, complex and poetic. Alongside Pinkhassov’s seductive aesthetic sits a documentarian’s engagement with world events and the human condition. The most contemporary works included here are two extraordinary images taken in Kiev this year in and around the protesters encampments in Maidan Square. In their visual beauty and scale, akin to a tableau d’histoire, they transcend their subject matter. Yet, Pinkhassov’s engagement with enfolding events led to an empassioned call to fellow Magnum members to travel there to bear witness: “I remain convinced that documentary photography should remain our agency’s priority (even if all the magazines disappear) if only out of respect and gratitude to our founders, who were counting on us to continue their work when they created this chain of succession, this “genetic code”.”