ONE-ONE

Oil, graphite, acrylic, torn canvas, print
2022-2024

Series of collaborative works created with artist Olya Makhno for the project One–One.
The project grew from a simple premise: complete trust in a shared creative process. There were no predefined rules, no discussions of themes, concepts, or stages of production. Each work began in the hands of one artist and, at an intuitive moment, was passed to the other.
Rather than negotiating authorship or direction, we allowed the paintings to evolve through response, interruption, and continuation. Every transfer became an invitation to listen, rather than to control, creating a dialogue that unfolded through materials, gestures, and time.
The resulting series reflects a process of mutual attention and openness, where the final image belongs neither to one artist nor the other, but to the space created between us.

Habitat bug. Environment error

Series explores alienation and dissonance between self and surroundings, using fragmented landscapes from a personal archive of photographs from Kiy Island, White Sea. Rooted in the artist’s experience of cultural displacement between Russia and the West, the works reflect on identity suspended in a “no-place,” where environment becomes unfamiliar, fractured, and existentially unstable.

Space will be ours

This series explores the enduring human yearning for an ideal elsewhere—once projected onto the cosmos as a dream of transcendence, later weaponized as a symbol of Cold War rivalry. Despite our reach into space, the deeper void remains: a restless drive to possess, control, and consume that has shifted from territorial conquest to the colonization of personal and ideological space. In today’s fractured world—marked by East–West polarization, political instability, and a crisis of shared belief—the works reflect on the loss of unifying myths and the quiet erosion of collective faith, asking whether another kind of “cosmos” might still be imagined.

Carpet series

The Carpets series explores cultural dissonance, isolation, and illusion through paintings that mimic real carpets. Blending Eastern and Western visual codes, the works juxtapose ornamental patterns with figurative images and evoking themes of forbidden desire, Soviet-era domesticity, and contemporary “fakeness.” The carpet becomes both a personal memory (a childhood play space) and a metaphor for today’s fragmented reality, where nostalgia, politics, and absurdity intertwine.