The works that you will discover on this page have been painted in the last three years of my life in the former Soviet Union.
In June 1987, straight after my graduation from the Kharkov’s Academy of Fine Arts, I was conscripted to army, and spent two years in Kiev; pretty much straight after the explosion in Chernobyl. I was working in the military propaganda studios as an artist and having had so much more freedom compared to the ordinary soldiers, I had a good insight of what was happening at that time in Ukraine’s capital. The recollections of some of those experiences are used in my memoir ”Velvet Salt”.
All these artworks you see here, have been created after my return from the army and up to 1990; the year I escaped from the crumbling Soviet empire. It’s not easy for me now to describe the state of mind I painted them in. I guess a playful attitude towards depiction of human’s figure had always been one of my features, and that what I sense looking back at those works now. Those paintings don’t have strong and bright colours, but rather exist due to subtle use of tonality. They may seem time worn, almost like old sepia photographs that you’ll find in your grandmother’s album.