My story
I grew up in Russia, trained in art, and spent years working as an architect. I was good at it. But I was also carrying something I didn't know how to put down.
My father died when I was 13. Suddenly. Without warning. And I did what most people do — I kept moving. I buried it in work, in ambition, in crossing oceans. I immigrated to New York. I took photographs of everything, as if capturing moments could protect me from losing them.
It couldn't.
Photography had been my anchor since childhood. But after years of therapy, of finally letting myself look back — I realized it was no longer enough. It could document. It could freeze. But it couldn't hold the weight of what I was carrying.
Paint could.
Artist Statement
I explore memory as an unstable construction — something that doesn't simply exist in the past, but is assembled, again and again, in the present.
The starting point is personal. I lost my father without warning when I was 13. My memories of him slowly collapsed into photographs. Without them, whole moments would cease to exist. That realization made me question whether memory is a record at all — or something far less certain.
I think of memory as neural reconstruction: each time we remember, the brain rebuilds the experience from scratch. What I remember differs from what you remember of the same moment. The past is not a fixed reality. It is a subjective, distorted reconstruction — filtered through the self that exists right now.
This is what I make visible in my work. Every painting begins with a photograph I took myself — an attempt to hold a moment still. I transfer the printed ink from the photograph onto the canvas, peeling the image away from its original surface. What remains is a ghost: a partially destroyed impression, like a memory already beginning to slip away.
Over that trace, I paint and draw — in oil, acrylic, ink, pencil, and whatever the work demands. I distort, interrupt, and add. My marks act as flashes of neural activity — sudden images, emotions, fragments. They conflict with the original photograph, transforming it. The moment is no longer what it was.
Visually, my paintings hold two realities at once: something recognizable and something abstracted beyond recognition. This tension mirrors memory itself — shaped by loss, time, and who we've become since.
For me, painting is an act of resistance against disappearance — an attempt to hold what is escaping, knowing that in holding it, I will change it. The canvas becomes a place where the static trace comes alive, where memory regains a body, and where forgetting and preserving exist in the same gesture.