Andrei Volkov. The Preservation of Time

A master of contemporary abstract painting, Andrei Volkov comes from a dynasty of artists begun by a prominent Russian painter of the first half of the 20th century, Alexander Nikolaevich Volkov, who painted “Pomegranate-Coloured Tearoom” (1924) from the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery. 

Andrei Volkov began to exhibit his works in 1986 with figurative paintings, in which pure color began to prevail. His formation as an artist would have been impossible without the American abstraction of line, in particular, the works by Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Ellsworth Kelly. He deliberately moved away from subject matter and figurativity, having chosen ‘formal’ qualities of the painting, such as plane and line, surface and color. Red became his favorite color.

Andrei Volkov is now one of the most radical abstract painters among Russian artists. His compositions, distinguished by the materiality of color, juxtapose depth and surface, dynamic and static, the space of painting and the space of reality mirrored in it. The artist uses actually reflecting surfaces, in which the viewer is mirrored, altering the space of an abstract painting with their presence. 

The viewer is invited to interact with the painting, to engage in a visual dialogue, in course of which they might acquire new sensual and mental experience, an experience of freeing oneself from mundane reality by establishing a contact with the reality of abstract art.