Leonid Tskhe

    Embraces
    Las Meninas
    The Risk-taker
    Ivory Black
    Rehearsals
    The Boy and the Ball of Thread
    NeoPetersburg  
    Sever-7
    Palaces
    Performative Drawing


About
Conversation

I think and work in cycles. They can feature works created with different techniques, but sharing some common aspects: formal, emotional, conceptual. Pauses between cycles can be long, since each one is a new experience. The more I delve into painting, the more I am interested in the theme of human identity and, particularly, in the merging of different normative beliefs associated with it, including in the history of the genre itself. For instance, how do gender and academic/modernist form relate? In this search, everything matters: my long-term academic training, immediate social reality, the space of the studio, family, daughter, my own body, the Old Masters and contemporaries. As I formally reassemble a conventional classical painting, this inevitably entails changes in its substantive, pictorial, gender and conceptual aspects: composition, protagonists, ideas about corporeality and normativity. By means of painting, I, thus, construct or reveal a certain universal, androgyne, identity, and this happens every time through personal living experience.