Razgulyai

Russian artist Semyon Faibisovich has returned to painting with a vengeance. He abandoned the medium from the mid 1990s for more than 10 years, in the face of an exclusive conceptualism then rampant in Moscow, working instead as a writer and filmmaker.

Ikon presents Faibisovich’s first UK exhibition, with a new series of paintings derived from mobile phone photographs. Depicting scenes of everyday life in Razgulyai, the Moscow district where the artist has been living for the last twenty years, these paintings focus on marginalised, unglamorous individuals. Homeless and alcoholic residents of the city are treated sympathetically by Faibisovich as they go about their days, and likewise working class people who are in stark contrast to the Russian nouveau riche. The artist clearly identifes with them, conveying their strength of character despite their circumstances.

The brushstrokes in Faibisovich’s canvases betray their origins in low-resolution images. The mobile phone technology they embody, democratising the business of image-making, complicates his revived commitment to the high art medium of painting.