A Cake Walk the Plank - New Paintings by ILYA Volykhine

We are pleased to invite you to the opening of Ilya Volykhine’s new solo exhibition:
Opening reception: Tuesday 7th May 6-8pm

RSVP:
auckland@exhibitionsgallery.co.nz or phone Ngaire (09) 5235560

Born in 1966 in St. Petersburg, Russia then Leningrad, USSR Volykhine is part of a generation of artists who came of age in a war-torn, divided country. He spent his youth in the Soviet Union, and received his arts education on benches at the Hermitage.

His paintings are characterised by a unique combination of realism and surrealist abstraction using figures. These figures, though squarely-centred in his paintings, often have the appearance of being part of still life. The scale is frequently arbitrary, the perspectives and differences between the characters seem to allude to different time zones or planes of existence.

Volykhine continues this collage-like approach to his paintings using text in his native language of Russian in Cyrillic as a note to both his sometimes disjointed narratives as much as his personal history. While similar figures reappear throughout Volykhine’s compositions, each of his works nonetheless emerges as a self-contained perspective entity–a standalone epic complete with its own unique storyline.

Volykhine refers to this sense of integrity as a painting’s “nervous system,” a metaphor which also elucidates how the otherwise arbitrary and often otherworldly narratives retain a sense of plausibility. As he notes, “As soon as I have the feeling that the thing has blood circulating through it, a nervous system, a backbone, then questions as to the message become…almost inconsequential”.