Bold Dolgorjav

Bold Dolgorjav (b. 1952, Khuvsgul) is among the most decorated artists in the collection. He trained at the Fine Arts College in Ulaanbaatar and graduated from the Repin Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg in 1977 — the most rigorous academic path of his era. Mongolia named him a State Prize laureate in 1994 and People's Artist in 2012, and his work hangs in the National Modern Art Gallery.

Though academically trained in realism, Bold is best known as one of Mongolia's most influential abstract expressionists: sharp colour and vivid, angular forms that first earned him a wide reputation in the 1990s. His “Composition” canvases treat abstraction as emotional physicality — soft, sharp, smooth — while works like the Khovsgol Lake studies return to the lake country of his birth. He has exhibited across Europe, Japan, the USA and Asia's triennials and biennials for four decades.