Ilya Shkilin's latest exhibition showcases a collection of paintings of nightmarish vision into human human condition and the ways we deal with our psychological demons. The exhibition is called "Disappearing", which also explores the way our memories work and

Result #1

our unconscious thoughts form the basis for drawing.A deep black-and-white painting, A Jew in Paris, 2006, portrays a young girl, her body obscured by a white rose, her hair dyed blond. In an abstracted style, she is also clad in white cotton panties and a white stockinged leather skirt. Her reflection in a mirror is turned into a full-length mirror, now standing at the edge of the canvas. If the image of the young girl in the bright yellow stocking is present in this picture, her presence is felt in many other ways, as the retinas blur into the surrounding space. This is the double image of memory that Shkilin uses to grapple with the tension between our expectations of our own physical beauty and our perception of others. In her hands, her subjects become mirrors for our perceptions of what we see, or the other person as a reflection of what we already think we see.

Result #2

Ilya Shkilin's latest exhibition showcases a collection of paintings of nightmarish vision into human human condition and the ways we deal with our psychological demons. The exhibition is called "Disappearing", which also explores the way our memories work and are overwritten by the day. The artists use of perspective as a key tool is most evident in the four paintings that make up the vast majority of the show. These are diptychs that are roughly divided into two equal sections. The left panel presents a panoramic view of a temple plaza. With an expansive area of gray skies and a large congregation of people, the temple seems to be a transcendent site, a city beyond the realms of the physical. The right panel, which is decorated with floral, cataract, and tree forms, emphasizes the presence of a dense network of steps and steps through which the body is perceptually dissolved, absorbed into the background. Her paintings portray a continuous flood of images of things that are ordinary, isolated from any human context.Even at its most abstract, an almost mystical vision of the world exists in these images of chaotic, dispossessed locations. The connotations of the scenes that Shkilin constructs can be confusing. For instance, in two untitled paintings, she depicts ordinary objects with inscrutable, sensual associations; these images seem strangely strange, if only because they are familiar: a men's open suitcase, a concrete block, an open book, a brick. Shkilin isnt revealing too much about her sources; it is too much to imagine that she is doing these things just because shes painting them. Indeed, what the paintings suggest is that the signs of our present environment are under constant assault. Shkilins painted images are made to appear already ancient, from forgotten ruins to urban wasteland. They are framed by the historical fragments that seem to make up the imagination of every alien inhabitant. Shkilin is always commenting on the most conventional of ways of viewing, to my mind a cultural cliché.

Result #3

Ilya Shkilin's latest exhibition showcases a collection of paintings of nightmarish vision into human human condition and the ways we deal with our psychological demons. The exhibition is called "Disappearing", which also explores the way our memories work and the way we distort them. Shkilins canvases are almost completely devoid of any human figures, yet we recognize them in our heads and in the mediums. The human beings depicted are typically massive and bipedal, representing a world populated by non-persons. In contrast to her earlier works, in which the figures were typically like Hollywood extras, this exhibition emphasizes a surprisingly specific and emotion-filled world of alien presence.Nightmares, 2018, features a female torso in a dreamy conflation of artist and body, its thighs virtually shot off. In order to draw the womans profile, the artist painted her thighs a faint shadow, which blurred into her shirt. This photo-painting was followed by a series of highly simplified images of the torsos of her hands, all which showed her head, chin, and shoulders. The images included the breast and forearm that demonstrate how the artist's hand is a source of anxiety. This homunculus of eroticism is extended further into the world of relationships, gestures, and the data transfer of meaning. Eyes and hands are at each others throats—even when the gestures look almost innocent. In contrast to the suffocating, anti-pornographic aspect of the medium, here the hand, the body, and the dreamer are one. The tender palmlike structure, the shallow space between them, is a sign of intimacy. With this abstraction, Shkilin's version of the figure of Eve, the combination of her tears and the morning light, represented the dreams of the artist and the viewer. A trance of sexual encounter or a form of communion can also be experienced in dreams.Faces of Knowledge and Fear, 2019, features a male torso whose face, neck, and legs are black. This photo-painting shows a face with his hands, fingers down between his legs and elbows, as if he were making love. His hair falls over the tops of his head, as if he were dreaming.

Result #4

Ilya Shkilin's latest exhibition showcases a collection of paintings of nightmarish vision into human human condition and the ways we deal with our psychological demons. The exhibition is called "Disappearing", which also explores the way our memories work and the paradoxes of perception, memories. And yet the painters work is mostly dominated by memories of the tragedies of the Russian Revolution and the early days of space exploration. They also capture the way we fear the transition from the peaceful to the violent, the way we recognize that there is a difference between our attempt to act and our desire to retain the conversation with the past that has led to conflict.Shkilin and her friend Vadim Zakharov have been visiting the Soviet Union for six years. In an initial visit, Zakharov discovered objects that showed signs of vandalism, such as smashed windows, torn posters, and photos taken from the Internet of an assembly of young women, who have come to meet their husbands in commemoration of the demise of the USSR. The paintings depict these female voices and memories. They are thus a reflection on the effect of separation on people. As the artists say, One becomes aware of the isolation of ones body. The paintings are at once figurative and abstract, abstract and figurative. The borders of the paintings are always purely visual, and the figures stand out clearly from the background. In one piece, a woman dressed in black is shown on a ladder. Her face is obscured by an expanse of darkly hued paint; the image is obscured by a red curtain; she has been photographed by a passing car. This self-censorship takes the form of a strong correspondence with our thought processes, a rapid feeling of mistrust. But at the same time, it also opens a discussion about power. In a similar painting, a man sits on a blue couch, his right hand on his lap, his left hand at his throat, looking directly into the camera, his chin slightly toward the viewer. The color in this piece is the same as in the other, but the feeling is different; the viewer is thrust into the role of an observer, a voyeur.

Result #5

Ilya Shkilin's latest exhibition showcases a collection of paintings of nightmarish vision into human human condition and the ways we deal with our psychological demons. The exhibition is called "Disappearing", which also explores the way our memories work and continue to function in complex situations. The installation, which has been completely hidden from the public, represents a sort of scene-set of the mind's progress. Hanging on one of the wall are two short, scale-model images of dark rooms, each floor of which is dominated by a heavy white wood partition. The partitions, in their bright colors, evoke the moody light of an everyday trip to the store or the airport. They are visible only from a distance, and the fragile separation between the partitions reduces the experience of both interior and exterior of the scene to a series of discrete experiences, which are subjected to an immense crisis of continuity.The large, colorful, stuffed animals displayed on the ground—also covered with artificial plants—contrast this formal color with the private space of the experience. In addition to the animals, which are printed on iron, here we see a number of hard-to-see images of their contents—depicts of their hollows, their shattered contents, pictures of empty gift boxes. Their coexistence is more than a metaphor for the disintegration of the psyche. At the same time, these scenes evince a truly cynical imagination, with the cruelty of the imagination leading to tragedy. In Shkilins hands, these images of crime and its destruction become metaphors of both the media image and the human condition itself, an association which does not bring the love of the murdered and ruined animals into a reductivist of romantic/dadaic ritual, but rather reflects a sensitivity to the complexity of the repressed, which combines the past, the present, and the future.The evening of the gallery is filled with people who ask questions in front of a black-garbeded window, while the space itself is tightly blocked off, opening up to the outer world. The gallery is divided into two spaces, which are connected to each other by a curved, brilliant, and raking, high-tech staircase.