Russian painter Sanya Kantarovsky's paintings and prints show pensive subjects mid-existential crisis. Sharpened or blurred with watercolour, fictional scenes appear as sober commentary on human nature.
Read MoreBorn in Moscow, Kantarovsky studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and completed his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Sanya Kantarovsky's paintings show ghastly but delicate subjects that appear to be caught in turmoil, as if submerged in endless reflections about the meaning of existence.
Kantarovsky's subjects appear marked by a will to death. Physically and psychologically at odds with reality, they are left to their own devices on the blank page or set against sombre landscapes that seemingly replicate the insides of their own heads.
This death drive appears evident in Jimmy Page Auto Asphyxiation (2018), in which a young man holds himself up by a cord, or Woe to Wit (2019), where a man in black is coiled in reflection above orange and purple spectres and human skulls.
In Cataract (2019), a bleeding corpse-like man kneels on a sand-white beach as a seagull watches over. With a wrinkled face and a single eye, he clutches his injured arm and looks to viewers with resentment.
Representing all phases in the cycle of life, Kantarovsky's works often show children as symbols of beginnings and innocence being sheltered or manipulated.
Accordingly, Good Host and Curtain (both 2019) show a young faceless figure led to a door from which a malicious hand emerges, or with their vision obstructed by the hand of an adult wearing a sour expression.
Printed on washi paper, figures and landscapes are rendered with sharp contours, as if to emphasise the reality of disillusionment.
Kantarovsky's painted figures are assembled from elements gathered from illustrations, film, and advertising to offer pointed meditations on anxiety and impermanence.
Highlighting the universality of his concerns, Kantarovsky has said of the painting Violet (2016), a portrait of a man sitting on a train with a dog wearing a red cone, 'it's like a moment that never existed but you feel like you've seen before.'
In the watercolour-and-ink painting Rites in Pumps (2020), a red-heel-wearing Rabbi is arched over a dying woman. Partially distorted by the strokes of watercolour and ink, both bodies evoke the elusivity of death and the artifice of the promises of religion.
Just as stark, Uramado (2020) shows a ghostly woman with angular bangs and hollowed eyes looking towards the viewer while behind, a bald man lays flat on the ground with his teeth sunken into a brick.
Kantarovsky's publications include the 2016 book No Joke, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig and Studio Voltaire, London.
Kantarovsky is the recipient of the 2012 Acquisitions Award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Sanya Kantarovsky's works have been shown widely across Europe, North America, Asia, and the U.K.
Select solo exhibitions include Luhring Augustine Tribeca, New York (2021); Modern Art, London (2021); Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2020); Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2020); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2018); Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2016); Studio Voltaire, London (2015); Casey Kaplan, New York (2014); and Art Basel (2013).
Selected group exhibitions include FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2021); Antenna Space, Shanghai (2021); 2nd Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, Moscow (2020—2021); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018); 13th Baltic Triennial, Vilnius (2018); Canberra Museum and Gallery (2018); and Jewish Museum, New York (2017).
The artist's website can be found here.
Elaine YJ Zheng | Ocula | 2022
