Sergey Kiryuschenko

Sergey Kiryuschenko is an artist, curator, editor of the KALEKTAR platform, and member of the Nemiga-17 group.

In 1961, when Kiryuschenko was a young boy, his family moved to Minsk. In 1963 he joined the art studio of Sergey Katkov (1911–1976), which marked his early encounter and experimentation with expressionist painting and graphic art. One of his earliest works, his oil Self-Portrait from 1966, surprises with its free expressiveness and subtle understanding of color. In 1968 he attended the Belarusian Polytechnic Institute for one year and then transferred to the Belarusian State Theater and Art Institute (now the Belarusian State Academy of Arts) to the Department of Interior Design, where he studied from 1972 to 1977.

Kiryuschenko is considered one of the masters of Belarusian art and is regarded as one of the most influential living contemporary Belarusian artists. This is largely due to the fact that with each new decade, his art undergoes important transformations, continuously surprising the viewer with its modernity. Identifying himself as a painter and abstractionist, he also actively explores the possibilities of other media: sculpture and silkscreen, photography and video, earth art and public art experiments, neon art and text-based work. During his early period, he also experimented with figurative painting and printmaking.

Kiryuschenko has been able to explore and systematically test some key strategies and methods of Western modern and contemporary art, filtered through the lens of his own imagination and creativity. His work often resists the self-isolating pathos of Belarusian culture, as he has experimented with archaic forms and turned to abstract art, international movements, and experimental plastic languages in order to break with cultural insularity. Every few years, he changed the direction of his practice: From expressionist-realist and postcubist landscape painting, Kiryuschenko moved to nonobjective painting, only to return to figurative art through the study of archaism, and then, through the synthesis of earth art and conceptual artistic practices, to geometric abstraction. Relationships between real and abstract space are important in all his work, whether landscapes and architectural environments, metaphysical and mythological conceptualizations, or immersive textual experiments. He engages with text in his series High Time to Get Down to Down to Earth Art (2006–12), where he inscribed words directly onto decaying log walls and charred facades of rural buildings. For this series he also embedded English text into the structure of screenprints and polyptychs, blurring the line between composition and conceptual art.

Kiryushchenko has occasionally published open letters and manifestos addressed to the Belarusian art community. Some of these writings, such as his influential text advocating for the creation of a contemporary art museum independent from the state, have sparked public debate. He is primarily interested in questions of abstract art: after all, the ultimate goal of his continuous return to reality is the search for new artistic approaches to understanding the abstract.

In the 1970s and ’80s Kiryuschenko experimented extensively with figurative painting, placing special emphasis on the expressiveness of the brushstroke, the conditional and schematic representation of bodies and objects, and complex and fundamental color solutions. He created portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and figurative mythological scenes, such as Shepherd (1982, ZAM, D21238) and Picking Flowers (1983, ZAM, D21239), both in the Zimmerli collection. His work from this period reflects a focus on composition and color theory as developed by the institute’s art teachers Lenina Mironova (1931–2022) and Oleg Hadyka (1942–2021), as well as the formal experiments of the artist Israel Basov (1918–1994), who had a profound influence on his artistic language. He explains that these decades marked a dynamic period in his practice, with each passing year bringing more freedom: There were weekly trips to Vilnius, Moscow, and Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), where the artist held his first exhibition in a private apartment in 1970. His enthusiasm for postimpressionist and modernist experimentation gradually freed his art from figuration. After joining the Belarusian Union of Artists in 1983, he and his colleagues were assigned a workshop space, where the first major exhibition of their work was held in 1986. Over time, the residents of the workshop came to be known as the Nemiga-17 group, named after the workshop’s address. The group included Nikolay Buschik (b. 1948), Kiryuschenko, Anatoly Kuznetsov (b. 1947), Algerd Malishevsky (1921–1989), Oleg Matievich (1949–2016), Tamara Sokolova (b. 1950), and Leonid Khobotov (b. 1950). Some of the members later left the group, and Galina Gorovaya (1941–2011) and Zoya Litvinova (b. 1938) joined in later years. Dedicated to the task of renewing the language of fine arts, the collective represented the wider processes of restructuring within the Belarusian art world and a wave of Soviet nonconformist art.

These decades are characterized by the creation of several artistic collectives and unions with the aim of gaining official status and creating opportunities for exhibiting and promoting members’ work. The members of the Nemiga-17 group held more than ten major exhibitions together and ceased their activities only at the end of 2003, after completing a project at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Kiryuschenko also held a series of large-scale solo exhibitions in the Palace of Arts in Minsk; these serve as an excellent illustration of his success in pictorial explorations.

In the 1990s the artist worked on series of large paintings created for his solo exhibitions. In 1994 his first major exhibition, Space of the Blue, was held at the Palace of Arts, where his new approach to painting became evident. Working with expressionist techniques, Kiryuschenko began to move away from figuration and became fascinated with mythological, wild, prerational, and brutal subjects and style that he and his colleagues called “archaism,” which included anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and godlike figures. This position was popular among representatives of the Nemiga-17 group. In 1996 the Palace of Arts hosted his exhibition Escaping Land, which showcased large paintings created in only seven months, under the influence of his extended stay in the village of Rzhavka (Oryol Oblast, Russia). The vast and open landscapes dominated by contrasts of green, black, and yellow made a strong impression on the artist, and he took on the task of recreating the experience of a holistic landscape within the exhibition space.

After 2000 Kiryushenko’s art underwent its most radical transformations. As evidenced by the works shown in the 2001 exhibition Temptation by Space at the Palace of Arts, he continued to explore spatial categories, transforming real landscapes into abstract surfaces. Within the layers of color, the artist first introduced the element of the grid in the painting Death of Bobo (1999), which he superimposed on other surfaces in a manner reminiscent of modernist practices. For Kiryuschenko, this discovery of the grid remained a key moment in his creative development and even became his signature. The artist refers to his works created between 2002 and 2005 as “spatial meditations,” a characterization derived from one of the series made during this period. Despite the productive work of these years, he refused to participate in any exhibitions and concentrated fully on working in his studio. In his series Spatial Meditations (2002–05), Kiryuschenko attempted to give the pure, flat, and geometric painting spatial attributes of depth, aerial and linear perspective, and rhythm. In 2006, in accordance with the cyclical nature of his practice, the artist once again turned from the dialectics of abstraction to reality. This return is reflected in the title of the resulting project, High Time to Get Down to Down to Earth Art, first exhibited at Ў Gallery in 2009. As part of the project, he created a series of multimedia works, including earth art objects, painted polyptychs, conceptual works, silkscreen prints, videos, slideshows, and text. He covered old log cabins in the village of Uroda, where he resides in the summer, with colored panels, lines, numbers, and texts. Photographic images of buildings became the starting point for silkscreen prints and painted polyptychs, gradually moving from the realm of the real to the abstract and conceptual.

Since the 2010s, the artist has been working closely with the device of the grid, which became the primary element of a series of large paintings and a series of monumental exhibitions in 2012, Metabolism of Painting Space. He also creates grids on the walls of buildings in Minsk as works of street art and experiments with the grid applied on models of famous Soviet-era buildings. Kiryuschenko is both an active participant and an outspoken critic of the contemporary cultural landscape in Belarus. In 2014 he cofounded the research platform for Belarusian contemporary art KALEKTAR. In the 2020s he continued to work with the grid, transforming it into a black-and-white visual language. He has also returned to painting practices and archaism, creating the series of still lifes To Instill New Tastes (2015–18) and abstract landscapes reminiscent of his series Escaping Land (1996, 2019–).

Sergey Shabohin

Photo portrait: Sergey Kiryuschenko, 2017. Photo by Siarhiej Ždanovič.