Boris Kocheishvili’s formative years were far-flung even by Russian standards. He grew up in towns 7,000 miles apart: Eberswalde in East Germany and Ussuriysk (ex-Voroshilov), last stop on the Trans-Siberian before Vladivostok. With his father in the military and his anarchist grandfather encamped in Siberia, Kocheishvili was raised by his grandmother – who hailed from Mariupol in Ukraine, had Greek and Chechen roots, once lived in Mongolia, and stuck her grandson’s drawings on the kitchen wall.

Boris’s father was not impressed – unlike his new stepmother, a former model for Alexander Deneika. She encouraged Boris to study art in Moscow under Evegny Teis, in the Studio founded by Ignaty Nivinsky, who had designed the most theatrical interior in Russia: Lenin’s Tomb.

I first encountered the art of Boris Kocheishvili with Tamara Vehova in September 2015 – aptly enough inside Moscow’s Drama School Theatre.

I found his art disconcerting. The first name it brought to mind was Lyonel Feininger. Kocheishvili’s plaster relief Tower in a Forest (2009) has the sharp diagonals of Feininger’s Bauhaus Cathedral; Forest (2007), in monochrome, has a similar feel, with sharply receding perspective formed by slanting narrow lines. Window in the Forest (2016) uses collage to escape from such angular oppression. The women out for a Stroll in 1975 (repeated in Alley in 1976) tilt and sway like drunken figures on a lurching ship. Very Feininger.

Kocheishvili’s thin, elongated figures also evoke El Greco or Modigliani. His Тhree Figures (1980) could be Demoiselles from a Soviet Avignon, while his Picasso Lovers (2005) sees Picasso’s Blue Period Buveuse d’Absinthe reborn in a head-scarf as the soap-opera character Hilda Ogden (or so it seems to British eyes). Kocheishvili’s schizophrenically distorted Woman (1999) – one of his larger paintings, at 123 x 134cm – nods to Francis Bacon, while the three figures drinking and smoking around an angular table in Company (2006) offer a taciturn echo of Cézanne’s Card Players.

Kocheishvili himself cites prehistoric cave art, Pompeii, Cranach and Brueghel among his influences – and the slightly naïve, early 19th century Russian artist Grigory Soroka, whose emotional detachment has a bit of Hopper about it. Kocheishvili also extols the art of Serfs who copied Academic paintings in the Tver, Kostroma, and Yaroslavl regions but ‘didn’t think about form’ – producing portraits he describes as ‘Fayum-like.’ Kocheishvili’s work also contains echoes of Viktor Vakidin (1911-91), Vladimir Sterligov (1904-73) and Vasily Chekrigin (1897-1922). His emaciated Mother (2006) smacks of Alexander Drevin. Women, Moon & Flowers (1976), with incongruous goalposts and a moon as football, has a feel of Chagall.

With its flame-like branches, his blue and grey acrylic Nature (2013) – one of Kocheishvili’s most lyrical works – evokes some giant outdoor sculpture by Nikolai Polissky at Nikola-Lenivets. The patchwork hills of Heidelberg (2011), and an acrylic Green Landscape from 2013, both recall David Kakabadze – perhaps the nearest Kocheishvili comes to his ancestral Georgia (despite his admiration for Pirosmani).

Kocheishvili’s love of jugs and bottles evokes Morandi in whose still lifes, he says, ‘the entire 20th century is visible.’ Boris first saw Morandi in 1965 in Italy where, he adds matter-of-factly, a local girl wanted to marry him.

To Kocheishvili, Morandi’s jugs and bottles evoke ‘characters from Chekhov’ – and Chekhov also appears referenced in his 2006 depiction of three Sisters (although I like to think they also pays tribute to the bohemian Sinyakova girls who hosted Khlebnikov, Kruchonykh and Mayakovsky in their dacha south of Kharkov after the 1917 Revolution).

Kocheishvili’s jugs, milk-churns and bottles seldom have the whole work to themselves. They usually compete with, and comprehensively dominate, faceless human beings – as in the coloured plaster relief Copper & Green (2009) or the painting Walk & Picnic (2010).

Unlike his compatriots Weisberg and Krasnopetsov, who share his still life fascination, Kocheishvili is not associated with the Non-Conformists of the late Soviet period – which goes some way to explaining his unfamiliarity to a foreign audience. Although Kocheishvili’s work is as idiosyncratic and immediately recognizable as, say, that of Dmitry Lion or Dmitry Prigov, he is stylistically similar to neither. The Non-Conformists he most closely resembles are Boris Sveshnikov (minus the candy colours); Oleg Tselkov, for meticulous composition; Igor Novikov, for featureless figures; and Natalia Nesterova, for absurd situations. He also professes admiration for Rabin and Roginsky.

‘I knew all these people’ comments Kocheishvili drily ‘but I didn’t take part in their events.’ He preferred to tread his own graphic path. Unlike many Non-Conformists, Kocheivshili never had a day-job as a book illustrator: he didn’t need one. From a material point of view, although not wealthy, he ‘always found somebody ready to help… well-wishers and lovely women.’ In any case, his field of vision is too horizontal for him to feel at home in books.

To Kocheishvili, as to Shakespeare, whose sharp-edged humour he shares, all the world’s a stage. Kocheishvili’s love of silent comedy, meanwhile, references Jacques Tati. His love of cinema was fostered as a boy by access to films in East Germany and Ussuriysk. He absorbed Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky ‘hundred of times’.

Ussuryisk’s Dom Kulturi also hosted a thriving drama theatre and, as the city was home to an important military base, its House of Culture welcomed many prominent Soviet actors. Kocheyshvili’s love of the stage led ultimately to his second wife: the actress Liya Akhedzhakova (whose parents were also actors). Many of Kocheishvili’s compositions can be likened to theatre scenes. Sometimes they recall the carefully orchestrated paintings of Nicolas Poussin (who arranged wax puppets in a box before taking up his brushes). Artist’s wooden mannequins, and Asian shadow puppets, also come to mind when perusing Kocheishvili’s output.

His horizontal compositional sense (and quirky approach to perspective) echo Alexander Deineka, as does his love of sport – football in particular. Both men share with the Soviet illustrator Leonid Soyfertis (1911-96) a pioneering belief in sexual equality, with female athletes to the fore. That said, Kocheishvili’s sportswomen are often faintly ludicrous; Ball Game (1979) features stylishly dressed ladies playing soccer in high heels. And, if Kocheishvili is to be believed, the Beach in Lyme Regis (2010), on the south coast of England, is littered with female hammer-throwers. Tennis, volleyball and the old Russian game of lapta all feature in his work – although, to British eyes, lapta appears to be played with Surrealist Cricket Bats.

Kocheishvili’s ink drawing Start of Summer (1976) looks like a fashion-show beneath the cliffs. His three Models (2004) seem to have veered off their jagged catwalk; one appears to be performing an outrageous goose-step. A monochrome Pier (2008) juts into the river like a curved springboard; its seven figures are divided into four groups, who ignore each other. On another pier, Before the Storm (1988), three women wrap elastic arms around their bodies like manic conductors; one of them has three arms (for more notes?). Kocheishvili’s ultra-thin arms are sometimes double-jointed, often way too long. In Dinner (2006) arms are stretched out straight, touching the table as if it were a ouija board.

Kocheishvili’s anarchic sense of humour is mirrored by the chaos Tamara Vehova discovered when she first entered his studio in Chisty Pereulok, on the edge of the Arbat. It was, she recalls, ‘a complete mess. Works were stacked everywhere, with no titles, no dates – nothing!’ Kocheishvili’s studio is housed in a former communalka that you feel his characters have escaped from, having gone mad.

Vehova and Kocheishvili first met in 2005 in rural Tarusa, 90 miles south of Moscow, where Kocheishvili was staying at the dacha of his longstanding friend Alla Pologova, and working on his collage series of Pologova Landscapes (which incorporate photographs of her sculptures). The youthful Marina Tsvetaeva penned poems nearby; Vasily Polenov once plonked his easel across the River Oka. Tarusa has inspired many works by Kocheishvili – most enigmatically, his relief Landscape in Tarusa (2005) with its cross, water-pump and little temple perched across the river like a bird-hut.

Kocheishvili’s roaming eye is not limited to Mother Russia. An English Landscape (2008) has wadges of mauve heather and green moorland beneath leaden skies. Winter in Britain (2015), with its ruined church in the snow, seems to evoke Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. A French Town (2001) features a green and beige rugby ball as high as the town walls. His Greek Town (2013) has predictable white walls and blue sky; a relief entitled simply Small Town (2008) is wonderfully evocative of the sort of Italian hill village where you can buy a house for €1 these days.

His palette, while restrained, is not without powerful effect. To Kocheishvili, the White Sea (1998) really is white; so is the icy tundra of Siberia (2013). His view of Cherkizovsky Park (2013) in north-east Moscow is the nearest he gets to the coloured geometrics of Suprematism. He splices Wagner’s House in Lucerne (2013) into two, and splatters its white walls with an apocalyptic blood-red and green attuned to the Ride of the Valkyries.

Kocheishvili is obsessed with architecture. His Names series from the 1990s features bold-lettered names as part of the composition – yet Natasha reclines facelessly beneath a façade bearing her name, while the letters ОЛЯ (Olya, a pet name for Olga) sprawl between a church tower and colonnaded mansion. Architectural elements are scattered beneath a Banner (2006) bearing the name KOCHEISHVILI that could have been strung up by Komar & Melamid. Kocheishvili flits between Gothic ornament, Classical porticos and wonky towers on stepped pedestals (that reflect his fascination with the Baroque Znamenskaya church in Dubrovitsy, 20 miles south of Moscow, on the road to Tarusa). But Kocheishvili is no Lentulov: he prefers isolated towers to the clusters of onion-domes atop more typical Russian churches. His Russian Landscape (2012) has no domes but two pointed spires.

Despite his penchant for angels and the churches of Armenia, Kocheishvili does not believe in God – even if his art is profoundly influenced by Andrei Rublev, and pays regular tribute to the Madonna & Child… often ironically, as in Golden Women (2009), where one woman holds her babe infant aloft in adulation, and two others pay not the slightest attention.

The anonymous faces beloved of Kocheishvili have a lengthy history in Russian art, dating back via Evgeny Dybsky, Garif Basyrov and Irina Starzhenetskaya to late Malevich – hero of Kocheishvili’s Walk with Malevich (2015), incorporating three cut-out figures – and his fellow-travellers Konstantin Rozhdestvensky, Nikolai Suetin and Anna Leporskaya. The theatrical designs of Alexandra Exter routinely feature people with no faces, as do many paintings by Konstantin Yuon – especially when silhouetted – as in his New Planet (1921) or Tverskoy Boulevard at Night (1909).

Facelessness became a Kocheishvili hallmark from around 1980. Before then he was still drawing characters with facial features, albeit with a humour veering towards caricature. He is less interested in individuality than group inter-action (or alienation). The figure in the 2011 relief By The Sea is sitting not on a deck chair but a tiered throne, like King Canute. The same throne – again atop temple-like steps redolent of a design by David Yakerson – recurs in Artist’s House (2012).

Loneliness (1977) sounds like a work with just one figure, especially in Russian (Одиночество) – but no, there are two of them: one sitting; one lying on the ground. In Reflection by the River (1980) it is the distant hills that are reflected, not the foreground figures.

Three of the Women by the Water (2010s) are reclining on a pier, ostensibly ignoring the four others who are standing. Family (2006) has three figures staring blankly ahead of themselves with nothing to say. The 2012 relief The Stroll has its protagonists marching in different directions. Two Women in a Forest (2018) are lying down parallel to and oblivious of one another, like corpses, their feet crushed beneath the trees. A 2013 relief has two Women tilting away from each other in some pre-Covid premonition of social distancing.

In Dacha Street (1976) a black male silhouette is remonstrating with a more carefully depicted woman on a tilting veranda in a rocky mountain setting. In Family (2011), another of Kocheishvili’s rare male figures remonstrates with a wife who appears to be waving him farewell outside a sun-kissed Italian town. ‘If you write about love, you’re writing about loneliness’ as Kocheishvili observed in one of his poems.

Modernity is largely absent from Kocheishvili’s pictures, and he appears indifferent to creature comforts. ‘No telephone, no radio, no water, no women, no cows…so what?’ runs one of his poems. ‘We live well.’

He has ‘no love for people… well, maybe two or three.’ His country roads do not, like John Denver’s, take him home – they take him away (‘yводи меня, дорога’).

Conversations (1988) features four silhouetted figures with their mouths open. In the words of Pink Floyd, they ‘shout and no one seems to hear.’ There’s also a Pink Floyd Us and Them feel to the title of Kocheishvili’s Tretyakov exhibition: Я и ОНИ (‘Me and Them’). If I had to sum up the mood of Kocheishvili’s art to an Englishman who had never seen it, I think ‘Pink Floyd meets Monty Python (with a dash of Henry Moore)’ might do the trick.

I was disappointed to learn that Я и Они has nothing to do with Pink Floyd, but is merely a sign on the door of Kocheishvili’s communalka. The sign on the other side reads ВЫХОД ЕСТЬ (‘Exit’) – a tongue-in-cheek reference (I presume) to Erik Bulatov’s famous ВХОДA NET (‘No Entry’).

Although Kocheishvili professes distaste for the political aspect of Bulatov’s work, the two have been red-under-the-bedfellows since 1987, when they co-starred (alongside Oleg Vasiliev, Ilya Kabakov, Andrei Abramov and Semyon Faibisovich) at a Phyllis Kind show in New York entitled Direct from Moscow!

Kocheishvili and Erik Bulatov share a love of words although Kocheishvili, unlike Bulatov, seldom lets letters into his pictures; a 2010 relief – wherein four giant letters spelling РУСЬ (Rus, the old name for Russia) stand in front of a forest – is a nostalgic, patriotic or ironic exception. Bulatov draws inspiration from the verses of Vsevolod Nekrasov, but Kocheishvili is a poet in his own right – referenced (like Nekrasov) in the authoritative Anthology of Russian Poetry 1950-2000.

Kocheishvili’s poems stand out for their concision and lack of punctuation and, with their jerky presentation, look zany whether you can read Russian or not. He began to write poetry back in the 1960s, influenced by his Kharkov friend Edward Limonov – whose favourite poet was Velimir Khlebnikov, the ‘Russian Rimbaud’ and a leading exponent of Zaum: a punning, Dada-esque approach to language epitomized by Заклятие Смехом, Khlebnikov’s paean to Laughter (О рассмейтесь, смехачи! О засмейтесь, смехачи!). Kocheishvili’s art offers a visual counterpart to Khlebnikov’s mirthful wordplay.

Khlebnikov’s sister Vera married Piotr Miturich, the artist who taught Kocheishvili’s mentor Evgeny Teis. Miturich was with Khlebnikov when he died in 1922: Kocheishvili esteems his deathbed portrait ‘worthy of Holbein.’ It is not overly fanciful to see a kinship between Vera’s Free Trade from 1922 and Kocheishvili’s own graphic style.

Today Khlebnikov is immortalized in Malye Derbety, his birthplace on the edge of Kalmykia, by Stepan Botiyev’s elongated bronze statue surveying the steppe. The isolated, timeless figure could just as easily represent Kocheishvili himself.

‘I do not grow old’ begins one Kocheishvili poem.

‘The landscape is empty’ begins another. ‘I fill the landscape with myself.’