Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to announce Oleg Dou: Select Works, a vignette exhibition of contemporary multimedia artworks by Russian artist Oleg Dou. The exhibition opens Saturday, February 28th, with a public reception from 6:00 pm until 8:00 pm.

Oleg Dou was first shown in Houston during FotoFest 2012’s focus on Russia, where his work was featured in exhibitions with both FotoFest and Deborah Colton Gallery. Since this Texas debut, Deborah Colton Gallery has brought Dou’s work nation-wide, placing his work in prestigious collections throughout the United States.

Oleg Dou was born in 1983 in Moscow and graduated from the Moscow State Institute of Steel and Alloys in 2006. Since then, he has worked as an artist in cooperation with art institutions and curators around the world. Dou has won many international awards and has been represented at the photographic festivals, including the Pingyao International Photography Festival, China; the Seoul Photo Festival, Republic of Korea; the FotoFestival Naarden, Netherlands and the International Photography Awards Festival. His works were exhibited twice at the Kandinsky Prize (2007 and 2008), which is the main contemporary art exhibition award in Moscow. In the recent past Dou has presented a solo exhibition at the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, titled Another Face and has also shown his works internationally, including in his native Russia, France, Istanbul, and the United States. Dou’s work is in the collections of the Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona; Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Barcelona; JeJu Museum of Art, Republic of Korea; Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, Moscow; the Moscow Museum of Art and the Samawi Collection – The Royal Family of Dubai.

According to the July 2012 article in Artprice, which is one of the leaders in art market information, Oleg Dou as one of the top three artists under thirty years old world-wide in relation to auction prices of his work. His work has been published in art magazines worldwide and he recently released a book with distribution in Europe, “28. Oleg Dou”. Dou’s work is continuously inspired by his interest in human individuality and self-expression and the attempts to solve the problem of identity in our times. Visually inspired by the culture of fashion and surrealists, many of his projects are devoted to the relationship between a human’s inner self and his behavior in society and proposes that the expectations of society set the standards of behavior and thought in terms of what is appropriate and acceptable.

Founder and Managing Director, Deborah M. Colton remarks:

Oleg Dou's works start with a bare beautiful "naked" face with no makeup. Taking often months to create each work, these faces take on a different presence... to a world beyond what we have known, to reveal what is inside us in often the deepest depths of our souls. Sometimes revealing our inner most fears and sadness, sometimes looking into the future to centuries beyond us, his work is moving and compelling and touches all viewers deeply. In our often-superficial world where outer beauty and masking our true feelings is the custom, Oleg Dou's creations are original, refreshing and evolved. To connect with our inner self and the world around us often produces the positive effect of a desire to change –

Deborah Colton Gallery is founded on being an innovative showcase for ongoing presentation and promotion of strong historical and visionary contemporary artists worldwide, whose diverse practices include painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, photography, performance, conceptual future media and public space installations.