Born in 1967 in Ust Labinsk, USSR, Ilya Volykhine emigrated to the USA in 1991. He resided in NYC and exhibited there until 2000, when he left for Australia. He became a citizen of Australia in 2006, and since 2009 has called New Zealand his home. Volykhine’s work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout New Zealand and abroad, including the New Zealand Painting & Printmaking Award Exhibition, the Walker & Hall Art Award Exhibition, the Archibald Prize Award Exhibition in Australia, the Jacaranda Drawing Prize Exhibition, the Blake Prize for Religious Art and the Mosman Prize. Most recently, his work was selected for the 2016 Adam Portraiture Prize exhibition in Wellington. Ilya currently lives and works in Queenstown, NZ. His main means of expression is painting. More about Ilya: http://www.artofilya.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/artofilya/.
Artist Statement
I love the feelings of awkwardness that my paintings project through a mixture of both naive brush work, stylisation, and awkward situations. I’ve been recognised for my singular works combining text and figuration, and merging disparate elements of Russian iconography, re-inscribing strange and often obscured meanings into normative narrative structures reminiscent of comic strips and advertising.
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. In my latest works, I continue to expand upon strategies of collage, drawing, and painting that conjure earlier established themes and imagery mined from a myriad of sources including, movies, cult icons, literature, television, and my personal history. This broad range of historical references not only foreground my own interest in appropriating past visual and literary styles but also invokes the schizophrenic and pathological impulses at work in the Russian imagination.
As the use of colour has played an increasingly central role in my more recent works, so has the formal concern for surface, space, and technique, resulting in densely populated and fragmentary images that further articulate my refusal to offer a conventional narrative logic. Often at once perversely funny and poetically contemplative, I think my power lies in an ability to occupy multiple positions at once, and ultimately to implicate text and image in a slippery production of meaning.
Previous works
He’ll Never Grow Up
Hero Worship
Masha’s Last Tea Party
Life On The Edge
The Poetry Reading