| ILYA VOLYKHINE |
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ARTIST STATEMENT Once threatened by the advent of photomechanical devices, painting has struggled against slipping into irrelevancy, in the same way that human beings grapple with the possibility of being forgotten. Yet since the contemporary viewer has become so saturated with camera-made images, hyperrealistic forms such as photography and film have become banal and ineffective. Painting has regained a privileged status. The medium’s uniqueness, mythology and inherent ambiguities has allowed painting to become an open-ended vehicle for both artist and viewer to evoke personal recollections, to embody collective experience and reflect upon its own history in the age of mechanical reproduction. Artists as far back as the earliest cave drawings and sculptural pieces in clay have conveyed their particular spirit by portraying the human form. Children with no formal training at various levels of aptitude will spontaneously and enthusiastically draw the human figure. There is no more immediate imagery available to an artist with wider potential for metaphorical meaning and expression than the human body. A drawing of the figure can say everything the artist needs to say. The urge to unlock the secrets of capturing the look of the body is endlessly renewable and tantalizing. What is the Meaning of Figurative Art? It could be said that every drawing of the figure is a "self portrait". To a practiced eye much can be learned by studying figurative work about the mores and morals of the individuals producing it. Great figurative art invites the viewer to participate emotionally in the work. It communicates universally to all humanity. The portrayal of the body gives innumerable clues to how its creator thinks about scale, beauty, mortality and consciousness itself . Figurative art is an open envelope that can contain works as disparate as Michelangelo's Pieta and Francis Bacon's Screaming Pope. When an artist chooses the figure as a subject it is a decision to acknowledge the whole tradition and join and extend it. Where do Flemish still-life paintings and Giorgio Morandi Fit? Not at all. Figurative Art has as its' primary subject the portrayal of the human form and condition. The range of expression that the body affords the artist is key to its' allure. When the viewer sees a painting of bottles he knows the bottles are inanimate. When the viewer observes a portrayal of the figure it often seems to magically convey a sense of "life". The life that Dubuffet sees is different from the life that Boucher sees. Both were successful in using the figure to convey a world view that we can access easily through viewing their art. Ilya Volykhine
BIO Ilya Volykhine was born in Ust Labinsk, Russia, in 1967. He emigrated to the United States in 1991 (New York City) and came to Australia in late 2000. Volykhine has held several solo exhibitions in Australia and his work has been selected for various group exhibitions, including the Archibald Prize, AGNSW (2003) and the Blake Prize for Religious Art (2004). Ilya Volykhine's work was most recently selected to appear in the 2006 Jacaranda Acquisitve Drawing Award exhibition which will tour Australia trhough to 2008. Ilya lives and works in Sydney. GroundFloor Gallery 2006
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