Artist
Igor Mikhailenko
Nationality
UA
Works
1
Contemporary painter whose large-scale canvases explore the tension between gesture and intention, movement and silence. Working primarily in oil and mixed media, Mikhailenko constructs visual architectures that are at once visceral and meditative.
Mikhailenko works in oil and mixed media on large-scale canvases. His practice is rooted in a tension between controlled gesture and spontaneous mark-making. The surface of a Mikhailenko painting is a record of decisions - layers built up and stripped away, forms that emerge and dissolve. Scale is essential to his work: the viewer is not meant to look at these paintings from a distance, but to enter them.
His works do not depict scenes or narratives in any conventional sense. Instead, they propose emotional architectures - structures the body can inhabit, tensions the eye can trace. There is a quality of restraint in Mikhailenko's painting that gives his most dynamic canvases their power: the sense that something immense has been held, contained, made available without being explained.
The VIVA series represents the fullest realisation of these concerns to date. Conceived as diptychs, these works invite a sustained, dual attention - a conversation between two adjacent fields of force that are at once autonomous and inseparable.
