I was born on April 6, 1964, in the city of Chita. In 1991, I graduated from the Kyiv State Institute of Fine Art, and in 1996, I completed postgraduate studies at the Ukrainian Academy of Arts. I have been participating in professional exhibitions since 1988. I am a graphic artist and painter. 

       My creative identity was formed during an era when the social and cultural discourses that once seemed unshakable began to collapse rapidly. The premonition of an impending catastrophe became the inner core around which my artistic individuality gradually took shape. I am an artist of the pre-war decades. 

      The natural, often reflexive desire of every true artist to find support in their art—especially during transitional, crisis-ridden times—brought to life images that seemed to affirm the inviolability of foundations that had, in fact, long turned to dust. This ability to lean on air, if expressed convincingly and with talent, has an undeniably therapeutic effect. Such a new foundation, which I invented for myself in a fortunate moment of youth, was the idea of the “indestructibility of beauty”. 

      It is important to note here: I grew up and studied in Ukraine, in Kyiv. It is likely the influence of Kyiv that predetermined my deep fascination with European Baroque. However, I perceived “Baroque” not as a museum artifact long past its prime, but as a living expression of the ever-young, spontaneous self-creation of the cosmos. When the earth, richly soaked with hot blood, gives birth to beautiful flowers—so vivid and grotesque that even after centuries, dried and pressed in a herbarium, they still evoke awe and admiration in future observers. 

      One of the baroque genres—Vanitas vanitatum, which prescribes the depiction of the vanity and futility of human existence, a genre dominated by images of human remains or other symbols of decay and death—actually always turns itself inside out. What should, on the surface, frighten and testify to the perishable, ends up being portrayed so vitally that it elicits from the viewer not horror, but a sense of triumph, a near-festive aftertaste of eternal life.

      That’s what I seized upon. The world collapsing before my eyes—the very one I was a part of and considered inseparable from myself, with all its meanings, coordinate systems, and seemingly unbreakable rules—I transferred it to a plane beyond anyone’s reach: the realm of absolute ideas. In a way, I offer a personal experience of recreating the broader European cultural context through historical, artistic, and existential dimensions. By stepping over today’s pseudo-cultural constructs—often hyper-traumatic and devoid of meaning—I strive to model a new artistic myth, a new semantic space, where one can breathe freely and joyfully spend the rest of one’s life. 

     While maintaining a distinctive plastic language, I aim to create a new artistic reality, rich with allegorical, symbolic, and realistic imagery. At the same time, I, as an artist, deeply reject both the postmodernist cliché of the exhaustion of traditional meanings and one of the core ideas of surrealism—a movement I am often mistakenly associated with—that allows for the arbitrary, disjointed enumeration of things and concepts. 

      Be that as it may, if a miracle happens and these pale trinkets survive the present day, they will be passed on to descendants as relics of a mad struggle for the ability to breathe in a vacuum—or, more precisely, for the POSSIBILITY itself. 

      Almost all of my paintings are done in gouache on paper. However, in recent years, I have discovered a new practice: transforming gouache sheets into large-scale printed works. This gives me the chance to see myself “from the outside.” The bulk of my easel works were created in the 1990s, and I continued working in easel painting until the mid-2010s—until I fully turned to literary work.