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.
Embraces (2024)
One may say that the recent works are about living through terrible times, about violence and fear of losing what you love, the vulnerability and fragility of the world, yearning and tragedy, which has scattered everyone, and, therefore, about imaginary embraces. Everything is created out of some communication or lack of it. Nothing is painted here from life. It is just a blind movement, by touch. Once I finished, I realised that there are embraces here.
Las Meninas (2024)
The Risk-taker (2023)
By chance and the good will of the gallery owner, in the summer of 2023, artists Leonid Tskhe and Vlad Kulkov found themselves in an old Tbilisi house that temporarily became their studio. In these slightly surreal circumstances, the long creative silence of both was interrupted and a series of paintings came to life. Art historian Andy Shab talked to each of them about the experience of working in the same space and their perception of each other’s creative process. “The risk-taker” is how Vlad described Leonid and his artistic method.
Ivory Black (2021–2022)
This large black and white series appeared back in 2021. At that time, I had increased anxiety, was in a very depressed mood, but the series turned out to be a premonition of an even greater impending tragedy. The cycle, at the same time, helped me reboot in painting colouristically.
Rehearsals (2021)
The series is the earliest example of collaboration between Teodor Currentzis’ MusicAeterna and contemporary artists. They depict the orchestra’s rehearsals to illustrate concert booklets. “I have many childhood memories of the House of Radio: my dad worked there and sometimes took me to concerts. So, I made a series of drawings in which I tried to capture that intersection of music, new sensations and old memories.”
The Boy and the Ball of Thread (2018–2020)
The work on this cycle coincided with Marusya’s birth and growing up; she is part of many works. This period also coincided with the beginning and end of the pandemic. My collaboration with the Moscow gallery OVCHARENKO began with this body of work. The title of the inaugural show, The Boy and the Ball of Thread, gave the cycle its name.
NeoPetersburg (2014–2018)
This first and most extensive painting cycle spans different events and projects. It all began with the show NeoPetersburg in the local Name Gallery and ended with Stagings in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. The cycle developed over the time of my teaching at the Academy and close collaboration with the art group Sever-7 (North-7).
Sever-7 (2014–2018)
Having graduated from the Academy at 23, I knew absolutely nothing about contemporary art. I began to move in that direction only later, when my mentor Andrey Pakhomov invited me to take part in his experimental workshop and teach in the graphics department of the Academy. Most significantly, it was at this point I came across the members of the art group Sever-7 (North-7) – Nestor Engelke, Alexander Tsikarishvili and Nestor Kharchenko – or, to be precise, renewed my contact with them from the times of the Art School. Soon after, the guys launched the Sever-7 art space in Nikolsky Lane. Exhibitions, performances, parties – all this excited me. I began to draw these events. I looked at everything that I did and had been taught at the Academy from this novel perspective.
Palaces (2017)
Perfomative Drawing (2010–2017)
The idea of “performative drawing” derived from my teaching experience and participation in performances and exhibitions of the art group Sever-7 in St Petersburg. To put it simply, it is a synthesis of drawing and performative practices. Whereas a traditional academic drawing course teaches you in a group how to draw a figure, performative drawing is an act of transforming this classical scheme into an artistic practice. Students draw a model and perform as a model; they can use various means and come up with their own ideas (including poses, drapery), creatively penetrating the very essence of the process of drawing-posing.