Oleg Vukolov was born in Georgia, studied at the Repin Academy of St. Petersburg, then moved to Moscow in 1969. In the seventies and eighties he participated in countless representative Russian exhibitions targeted at international audiences, from North Korea through Yugoslavia to Cuba, but his works were on display in a number of Western European countries as well. At the international exhibition organised in Moscow and New York to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the onset of the space age, he won a gold medal with his triptych portraying Yuri Gagarin, which was a monument to the Soviet triumph over the Americans. He is most comfortable in traditional genres, mainly creating portraits, still lifes, landscapes and interiors. In 1984 he painted a double portrait of Peter and Irene Ludwig. Towards the end of the eighties, he began focusing his interest on an unusual, symbolic object, the pillow as a banal yet intimate element of everyday life. His deftness at painting pillow compositions and the emphasis of plasticity reveal Vukolov’s mastery. However, the painting in Ludwig Museum’s collection asserts the principle of simplified composition, with an extremely stylized background and the figures appearing as a grey mass in a single block.