Ilya Volykhine

Emerging from behind the iron curtain, my paintings, and works on paper, capture the underlying forces that dominate and determine the conditions of the human psyche.

I have been told by my favourite auntie that as a 2-year-old kid I sat on the pavement outside my parent’s house with my feet in the gutter digging with a broken stick. I liked scraping and scratching at the dirt, she said I found it soothing.

Aged 5, I was dragged kicking and screaming into school. I didn’t like being there. The place was petty, cold and heartless. The only times I felt at all within myself was when we had morning play or did painting.

We made pictures with the powder paints; mixing the colours soothed me. This is what I’ve kept on doing (and have always protected within myself ) even when I was working shuffling asphalt in our small town before I left for America.

Art has always been what I go to. This uncompromising streak is how I have aligned myself with the universe: It is very simple and ordinary because it is nothing more than expressing my nature: I’m an artist and doing what I’m meant to be doing: I believe that art can be defined as line and form coming through the hand – the head, and even the heart, somehow have to get out of the way.