Sanya Kantarovsky

Kantarovsky
Growth X, Oil and watercolor on canvas, 75 x 55 inches, 2023.

Monday, November 6, 6PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Penthouse Room 901

Visiting artist Sanya Kantarovsky will deliver an artist talk centered around his artistic practice and recent works.

Sanya Kantarovsky’s artistic practice revolves around painting, oftentimes incorporating film, animation, sculpture, design, and curatorial projects. His paintings take aim at imagined human subjects, which are often entangled in a variety of discomforts, both psychological and physical. Drawing on the history of humanist painting and caricature, Kantarovsky’s subjects seem proud to have been rendered and simultaneously embarrassed to exist at this elevation, embodying a doubt that echoes the artist’s own fraught relationship with the project of painting. This indulgence in affect is marked with a wry self-reflexivity, acknowledging the futility of faithfully transmuting lived experience.

Kantarovsky was born in Moscow, Russia in 1982 and currently lives and works in New York. He studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI and received his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kantarovsky recently presented solo exhibitions at Nonaka-Hill in Los Angeles and Taka Ishii in Kyoto (both 2023). Recent institutional exhibitions include Aspen Art Museum (2022), Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland (2018), and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy (2017-2018). Group exhibitions include Brave New World – 16 Painters for the 21st Century at Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Radical Figures at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Baltic Triennial 13 GIVE UP THE GHOST; The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin at the Jewish Museum, New York; The Eccentrics at Sculpture Center, New York; and his curatorial project Sputterances at Metro Pictures, New York.

Presented by the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts