some infos about me

and the backgroud of my work

Philosophy

While I was starting to take part in first group exhibitions in 1987 with abstract paintings, it remained essential for me to understand how making art could be a conscious and holistic experience of the world as it is. How could one defend the idea that any piece of art could potentially "tell the truth", that by purely imagining a piece of art one could catch a substantial part of the reality itself?

To define a valuable candidate for that concept of truth, I had to investigate our different traditional ways to understand reality and knowledge, and to broaden it so that it could integrate art as a tool to access to reality.

While making my first steps as an artist I studied philosophy at the LMU Munich, studies that led to a PhD thesis in 1991, a thesis that defended the truth of art by investigating the contemporary concepts of truth itself.

My artistic work was at its beginnings based on the Platonic tradition that art had to represent something. In Moscow (1991 - 1998) I worked on abstract oil paintings that were meant to express my feelings about the world I lived in.

Later, while I stayed in Vienna, I produced and exhibited conceptual paintings, installations and objects, and I also made some artistic interventions in the urban life. I wanted my art to be an image of certain range of social and intellectual questions that haunted me.

From 2015 on, I started to deal with the non-dual experience of art

as a subject by itself. Working on a paper about Kasemir Malevich, who had claimed to have created the icon of modern times in painting the black square on a white surface, I realized that the content of art could simply be its own capacity to enhance an experience.

In a totally different, non Platonic tradition, art does not intend to tell a story, not even the story that it is not telling one. It would guide you into an aesthetic experience, in which your mind fully enjoys its playful but ultimately necessary mission to perceive the world. What a wonderful and self sufficient thing to do...

The holes in my paintings are laid out carefully in the midst of the limited painted surface, as rocks and stones in a Japanese zen garden (I also recently discovered John Cages work "stones" on that subject) and the painted area as the crushed gravel that has been raked into patterns.