Volodymyr Strelnikov was born on October 25, 1939 in Odesa. He is a Ukrainian non-conformist painted who emigrated to Germany in 1978. Strelnikov studied briefly at the Odesa Grekov Art College but was mostly self-taught. He worked as a muralist in Odesa and participated in and organized some of the exhibitions of unofficial art. Strelnikov has experimented with reduced shapes and the interrelationship between figures and architecture. In his later pictures architecture and figures have been reduced to simplified patterns within the larger contained form, so that a tension is sustained between the detailed, intricate shapes and the surrounding smooth areas of warm color. Since late 1980s the artist abandoned figurative paintings and mostly creates non-objective oils on panel and pencil on paper drawings. The artist lives and works in Munich, Germany.