Existence in the Void by Nejat Kavvas
We sculptors are generally trying to fill the void with something meaningful and aesthetically rewarding. Beautiful Queenstown is a great challenge and a charming backdrop for what I want to share with you in this exhibition.
Painted Cities by Ilya Volykhine
Realized in a variety of media; oils, inks, pastels on both canvas and on paper, ILYA Volykhine's latest solo exhibition titled, Painted Cities , interweaves his memories of shifting from his homeland of Soviet Era Russia, to New York City, to Los Angeles, to Paris, to Sydney, to Auckland and to Queenstown with personal snippets and stories from his own life situations.
His paintings are always keenly personal; with flattened and simplified forms, a sense of the estrangement of reality along with farcical situations all aiding to transform modest scenes from everyday life into captivating visual stories. The artist’s forms and lines seem to emerge and recede through collaged layers of paper creating multilayered records of experience. Not only remembering his experiences but leaving traces of the histories and previous layers of the diaries of his thoughts to form the present works. Gorgeous colour work and a gentle hand allow figures to dance and relate.
Speaking about Ilya Volykhine, arts writer, Nadine Imperati once described his intuitive way of arranging his subject on the paper or the canvas, and said that the lack of any academic structure explained a great part of the exotic attraction emanating from Volykhine's work; academic rules for composition or ‘proper drawing’ were not important to him, and he rejected categories such as modern or post-modern and prefers instead unrealism .