Painter Rybek Akhmetov, who signed his work "Rym," was born in Russia in 1948 to nomadic Kazakh parents. He developed an interest in various art mediums from an early age, including painting, film, and theater. He enrolled for a time in the Union of Young Artists in Kazakhstan, but, as with many young Kazakh artists, whose families had been violently separated from their nomadic lives during the formation of the USSR, he felt oppressed by the academic environment. He eventually left to live a nomadic lifem travelling throughout Kazakhstan, working odd jobs, herding sheep, and finding paid work as a decorative painter when possible. In the 1980s was a member of the Night Tram, an association of Kazakh artists including Sergey Maslov, Andrey Popov, Olga Rubinchik, Yuri Yakovets, and Alexander Privalov, who rejected Soviet-approved art in favor of Western contemporary modernism and postmodernism. 

In an early 1990s interview with San Francisco-based Russian artist Sonia Melnikova-Levigne, he said, "I am Kazakh, but I was born, in 1948, in the Far East of Russia. In 1938 my father was sent to Sakhalin to where he broke rocks and dug the earth for twenty years. That was the long journey of a nomad and he never returned to his steppes. He taught me two truths: there is nothing sweeter than freedom and nothing more beautiful than the way.

"As a descendant of a nomad I love to contemplate and fall in to thought but I did not like to build. For that reason I became an artist. I worked in film studios and publishing houses and participated in art exhibitions. I was allowed to enter the Union of Young Artists in Kazakhstan. Everything was okay but grief grew in my soul. I became a drudge. A fallen bird.

"One beautiful day I opened the door and went for a stroll. That stroll lasted for four years but I saw all my land. I earned my bread loading animal manure, harvesting potatoes, herding sheep, and painting -- fences and tin trays. I used all kinds of garbage to paint upon. I made myself pants and a jacket out of my canvases which protected me well from the cold winds. I drank lots of rot-gut vodka and earned my way into all the drunk tanks in Kazakhstan. But the gods of the nomads preserved me. 

"I am delighted and bow before the wonder of perpetual realization that everything repeats itself. How strange it is that I repeat the way of my father. I am the same kind of vagabond. I don't have a home. I dig the earth. And I have my own rock pile to break -- these are my paintings."

Little else has been found on the life and career of Rym, however, he is mentioned in a study regarding self-organized 20th century Central Asian art groups (2021 article by Victoria Erofeeva).