Ilya Volykhine Travelling Without Moving at SOUL Gallery

EXHIBITION PRESS RELEASE

Ilya Volykhine Travelling Without Moving at SOUL Gallery

Exhibition dates: 2 - 21 April, 2015
Release date: 18 March, 2015

ILYA VOLYKHINE's latest paintings are darkly comic, the characters within his pictures battling their way through the anxieties and joy of life, his narratives loose, playful and chaotic. What lies at the heart of his current exhibition is Volykhine’s intuitive process, his willingness and confidence to allow the story to unfold as he paints, his expressive brush and colour work opening up a space for his characters to breathe, to take on a life yet unexplored. This confidence in allowing the picture to speak for itself gives him time to understand his subject matter, invest each painting with emotion as each character confronts the vagaries of life and reflects his own view of the world. One that is both incisive, humorous and poignant.

It’s the work of a man who has experienced much over his life. He left Russia for New York in his early 20s before moving onto Australia 10 years later and finally New Zealand where he now resides. This constant moving, this ongoing migration and learned assimilation, informs his work, each picture a collation of experiences and acute observations. A wry look on a world that is too often closed off.

Not formally trained Volykhine had developed his own comic aesthetic, a stylized language that is both literate and poetic, a comic farce which remains rootless and fluid, an ever evolving style that is not confined to historical convention. Here’s what he has to say about his own work: "I paint from my memory and imagination, everyday images of people in a whimsical world of farce. The work is generally based around exploring domestic interior/exterior spaces and how the figure moves, sits and interacts within these places. I love the feelings of awkwardness that my paintings project through the mixture of both naive brush work, stylization and strange situations."

Travelling Without Moving, new paintings by Ilya Volykhine opens at Soul Gallery, 300 Barton Street, Hamilton, New Zealand on the 2nd of April, 2015. The exhibition will run through to the 21st of April.

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Soul Gallery
300 Barton Street
Hamilton, New Zealand
+64 7 834 2120

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