Ilya Volykhine
Cheers Darlin’ $6,500 Status: Sold
The Music They Hear $12,000 Status: Sold
Four Strangers $6,500 Status: Sold
Lost in a Dream $6,500 Status: Sold
A Polar Bear Walks Into a Bar $12,000 Status: Sold
Colour Me In $6,500 Status: Sold
We are pleased to invite you and your guests to view Ilya Volykhine’s new solo exhibition ‘Monkey Business Card’
Address: 20 Brandon Street, Wellington
RSVP or enquiries: ron@exhibitionsgallery.co.nz
Phone: 04 499 6356
‘Monkey Business Card’ brings together small and large format paintings on canvas and paper that expand on the artist’s unique iconography of eccentric figures, and animals within vaguely familiar but imaginary settings.
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. Scale is frequently arbitrary and nonperspectival, and differences between the characters seem to allude to different time zones or planes of existence.
In the present show, 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 selfcontained 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”.
