Khalfin Rustam is a painter, sculptor, author of installations, performances, video artist, a bright representative of the Kazakh avant-garde, a gallery owner and a member of the Union of Architects of the USSR. He is also a diploma winner of the All-Union Review of Young Architects’ creativity (1972), one of the authors of the Republic Square in Alma-Ata.

He was born in Tashkent, then lived and worked in Almaty, and graduated from the Kazakh Polytechnic Institute, Faculty of Architecture (1966-1969), and State Architectural Institute in Moscow, where he became a student of Vladimir Sterligov. After the Institute, Khalfin settled in Almaty.  Together with his wife Lidia Blinova, he founded an art group and regularly held “apartment” exhibitions.

One of the components of Rustam Khalfin’s work was V. Sterligov’s formula: “Painting is a cognition of the Universe by color”, which was fully reflected in his artwork A Landscape with a Black Triangle.