Ilgar Talibov began painting nearly as soon as he could hold a brush. Winning his first art contest at age seven, Talibov continued to explore his own creative talents as he grew with age, eventually becoming a graphic designer and creative director.

Enthralled by the work of Cubists and Italian Futurist painters, Talibov considers his work to be a hybrid form he terms “Futuristic Cubism.” Though he was born at the tail end of the twentieth century, one could easily imagine Talibov at home with Picasso and Braque nearly a century earlier. On occasion he does break from tradition, encapsulating his imagery in circles and hexagons, leaving the rest of the canvas white, a blank space that isolates his paintings and seems to put them under a microscope. The process is one, he says, of transcendence to “imaginative dimensions.”

Baku, the Azerbaijani capital where Ilgar Talibov was born and raised, sits on the Absheron Peninsula in the Caspian sea, an ancient trading post city at the crossroads of Europe, Russia, and Iran. It was this environment of shared culture and ideas that fostered Talibov’s creative spirit.

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