Andrei Sharov: At Home in the World

Salamatina Gallery
Nov 28, 2014 7:48PM
Seated Woman in Blue, 2012
Salamatina Gallery
Untitled (no. 33), 2014
Salamatina Gallery

Andrei Sharov is a multidisciplinary artist of international repute whose projects have taken him all over the world. Like countless artists before him, including such illustrious compatriots as Mikhail Vrubel, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova as well as others such as Picasso who famously collaborated with Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes, Sharov is enthralled by theatre and dance and is a celebrated designer of costumes and stage sets. He is also a painter of note, his temperament inevitably leads him toward the expressionistic, dramatic and extravagant—a hallmark of all his projects—and toward increasingly brilliant, combustible hues. His vivid, often high-contrast paintings can be rough as well as fluid, driven by his love of the pigment’s materiality, by its sensuousness and versatility. His paintings crackle with energy, at times brimming over with an emotionality uncannily produced by color and brushstroke.

Sharov was born in Moscow in 1966. He has always wanted to be an artist; for him there were never any other possibilities. He studied painting and drawing privately. He continued to study fine arts at the Moscow Institute, even while pursuing a degree in fashion. His influences are many but artists to whom he feels particularly close include Vrubel, Gustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Sharov, like several of these artists, values spontaneity. He does not use preliminary sketches and prefers to make his paintings in one session as one prolonged, continuous burst of energy, similar to the processes of Zen masters, capturing the forces of the moment.

Sharov likes to rework the same themes, reconfiguring them to explore other meanings, other readings, each ultimately unique. Some of his recent paintings have appropriated famous nudes, such as Ingres’ Grande Odalisque, translating the smooth elegance and sumptuous details of the Neoclassical masterpiece into flickered strokes of paint and bold, jarring patches of colors that convey not only Sharov’s personal intensity and restlessness but also the agitated tempo and dissonances that characterize current culture. He leans out of a painterly ground that is reminiscent of a Clyfford Still, the American Abstract Expressionist of magnificently jagged force fields. Sharov likes to play with narrative intention and to find unexpected associations.

Salamatina Gallery