Ilya Volykhine

Based in Devonport, in Auckland, Ilya Volykhine is a critically acclaimed New Zealand figurative artist.

His long list of accolades includes being a finalist in the most recent 2023 Molly Morpeth Canaday Award, in the 2016 Adam Portraiture Award as well as, in the 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2021 Walker & Hall Art Awards, where he has won his figurative art. His international accolades include work in the Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Blake Prize for Religious Art, the Jacaranda Drawing Prize in Australia, and the Imago Mundi New Zealand Collection in Italy. Ilya has exhibited and held residencies worldwide, from New York to Estonia. Similarly, his artwork is found in private and public collections around the globe. 

Rejecting conventional narrative logic, Volykhine's works amalgamate various themes, sources, and references, mirroring the diversity of his life experiences. His manipulation of space, surface, and technique yields paintings that are both humorously perverse and contemplatively poetic.
 
In my latest works, I continue to expand upon strategies of collage, drawing, and painting that conjure earlier established themes and imagery mined from a myriad of sources including, movies, cult icons, literature, television, and my personal history.

As the use of colour has played an increasingly central role in my more recent works, so has the formal concern for surface, space, and technique, resulting in densely populated and fragmentary images that further articulate my refusal to offer a conventional narrative logic.

Often at once perversely funny and poetically contemplative, I think my power lies in an ability to occupy multiple positions at once, and ultimately to implicate text and image in a slippery production of meaning.