Art Hound

Sanya Kantarovsky is a Russian-born, New York- based artist who recently showed at the Baltic Triennial 13 in Livnius. I am super impressed with this relatively young artist’s work. 

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“The dark humor consistent in Kantarovsky’s work across a variety of mediums pits the sumptuous against the abject and thrusts private space – be it physical or psychological – into public view. Evoking the feeling of an uneasy inner monologue, figures are gawked at, exposed, poked, or spooned medicine. They interact with one another, as well as the edges of the canvas itself, testing the confines of their given bodies and their given frame. Similarly, Kantarovsky probes their art historical predecessors: both canonical and relatively unknown painters, writers and illustrators. The presence of these references simultaneously questions and indulges in a lineage of painterly impulses.” – Dina Akhmadeeva

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“Lush, moody, touching, and wry, the paintings of Sanya Kantarovsky (*1982) offer a strange form of address… These are saturated images, built up from washes of color, layers of references, sly nods to our contemporary moment, and the self-conscious stylistic inflections of painters of yesteryear. One senses that their maker believes in the urgency but also the absurdity of painting as he assembles marks that are not afraid to be imperfect, even awkward. They make almost palpable such emotions as alienation, embarrassment, intimacy, and desire, exposing quotidian human melodrama and existential cruelty, all while being able to laugh at themselves as they turn to you so that you may laugh, too.” –Kunsthalle Basel

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via Contemporary Arts Daily

Photos via Luhring Augustine, Modern Art, Tanya Leighton Gallery