Sergey Chaikun was one of the leading illustrators in the USSR (Russia) prior to the Perestroika, when the state-owned publishing industry was transferred to private hands. Chaikun’s works are highly intellectual. Depth, openness, tragic mood, internal light and an acute sense of the truth—all those qualities attributed to the elitarian art and all that distinguish him as a phenomenal contemporary artist.

Chaikun communicates with the audience in delicate, enigmatic and mysterious manner. His illustrations reflect the main idea of the text, its internal tension and tunes up the imagination of the reader. Every new book is like an undiscovered planet for the artist where he reveals new feelings through innovative artistic images. The first impression of his works is unexpectedness of his creative imagination, though, as a rule, he uses classical forms to depict an object. His works have been done in paradoxical, complicated and phantasmagoric style, they defined by scrupulous details and sharp individuality. Chaikun’s famous book illustrations for E.T.A. Hoffmann, Thomas Mann and Scott Fitzgerald are seen as independent philosophical pictures.

The artist combines traditional techniques such as oil on canvas, watercolor and collage with a very rare one -- aniline on photo paper. This allows combine laconic and picturesque manner with easiness and transparency, the richness of colors and their tender sensuality with a complicated manner of execution.

Chaikun’s works are held in public and private collections worldwide. The work “Origin of the Horizon” (50x70 cm, oil on canvas) is acquired by the United Nations in 2002 after a personal exposition at the Palace of Nations, UN in Geneva Switzerland. The Japanese Cartoon Museum bought his works in 1991. One of Russian leading political parties “Yabloko” (“Apple”) commissioned a logo that is now known to millions of people. Chaikun’s works have been successfully exhibited in Europe, Japan and USA.