Sergey Bondarev - Artist, painter, graphic artist, sculptor.
Lives and works alternately in Saint Petersburg and Milan. The artist's works can be found in private collections, gallery and museum holdings around the world. His solo and group exhibitions have taken place in Russia and Europe.
Born in November 1, 1980.
Graduated Ural State Academy of Architecture and Arts (2004), specialization - "artist - monumentalist"; the previous university was Yekaterinburg Art College of I.D.Shadr (1999), specialization - "graphic artist".
Winner of the Artist of the Year 2015 Award ("TOP 50. Most famous people of St.Petersburg").
Sergey Bondarev calls his style "New Impressionism". Everything that surrounds the artist, all the events that happen in his life, become the inspiration and themes of his works. He lets the surrounding reality pass through him: he deforms, transforms, and distorts it through the prism of his perception. The artist captures expressive impressions of life on canvas and plays with the viewer's emotions rather than with the meaning or concept.
Sergey grew up in a family of theater workers. He spent his childhood between his mother's puppet theater and his father's drama theater. His parents early noticed their son's passion for art and put him in an art school, since that time Bondarev has not stopped in his creative endeavors. Memories of his childhood spent in the theater laid a firm foundation in his work. The artist's inner vision is almost always directed towards the past, even futuristic motifs have a retro tinge. Having an academic art education, the artist often refers to the history of art and iconic images of world painting.
The main reference point is the medieval art and new trends of the 20th century. Bondarev often reshapes familiar images of the global culture into homages placing them in unfamiliar settings. He works in series in which a moment in the artist's life that seems insignificant can grow into a large series of works, while the tectonic shifts and social upheavals of the present usually go unnoticed. Sergey lives in his "artistic fiction" and is convinced that everything that is relevant today will sooner or later become obsolete — working with the eternal fascinates him much more.
Style
Collage as an artistic technique and as an idea is one of the keys for understanding the art of Sergey Bondarev. He became interested in composing pictures from disparate elements while still in art school, but developed and perfected his technique when he worked as an illustrator for a glossy magazine during his student years.
He uses figurative metaphor, allegory, and narrative in his works. Whether in representative or semi-abstract works, his vivid colors and expressive images bring a character, an anthropomorphic figure, a creature, a personality, or an object to the forefront. His characters are dramatic, impressive, emotional. They play character parts and the artist is fascinated by observing their expression and behavior. You can often see gloomy and dark images in his works. Skulls, skeletons, fairytale villains, furies, phantoms, distorted faces, but painted and decorated, turn into kitschy fashion masks that are beautiful and horrifying at the same time. His works demonstrate a distinct combination of two opposite poles: a clear demonstration of how beauty can be terrible and how the terrible can be beautiful.
Sergey is convinced that our life is artificial and naturalness is nothing else but laziness.
His works live their own lives. They do not need introduction or description. They are ironic and self-ironic, though humor has never been an end in itself for the artist, rather a way to attract people's attention, to encourage them to look at themselves and the world around them more closely.
The artist's main medium is painting with acrylic and tempera paints on canvas. The choice of material is due to the academic background of the muralist, whose area of expertise – wall painting, frescoes, and decorative panels – does not involve the use of oil paints. The artist transfers this technique to canvas in his works, and applies a glossy varnish as a final coat to give the works a classic look. He uses a multi-layered painting technique, overlaying contrasting colors on each other, which, when mixed and applied, create vibrancy, nuances, play of colors, a set of shades, and vividness of color. The artist almost never uses pure black color.
Sergey often experiments with different materials and techniques. The encounter of images, references, styles, meanings, and visual techniques are what makes Bondarev's style catch eye and stick in the memory. He speaks of frivolous things operating with the conceptual developments of the great Futurists, of important things with the bright colors of the Impressionists, and, at first approach, with the superficial methods of the Russian avant-garde. When discussing this, it is easy to slip into a boring game of name-dropping, an intellectual "guess-what-it-is," however, every element in Bondarev's works somehow refers to something, is associated with someone or something, and hints at something.
It is interesting to view the development of an artist through the prism of his childhood experiences. Psychologist Ulric Neisser coined the term "iconic memory" in 1967. This phrase refers to the memory of the eye or visual memory. This is a short-term phenomenon, but assuming that artists have the power to "archive" and use any visual clues to give birth to something completely new, Bondarev is quite successful at it. Having discovered the potential of collage, he further shuffles, mixes, and twists the "iconic", historical, and style references he has fed during the process of becoming, to create another area of his universe.
Solo exhibitions
2022 - "In tne Cafe of Dancing Lights", CUBE Moscow, Russia
2019 - "Anatomy", Antonov Gallery, St.Petersburg, Russia
2019 - "False Mirrors", Antonov Gallery, St.Petersburg, Russia
2018 - "Lilac Ladies", Orekhov Gallery, Moscow, Russia
2018 - "Chateau Perdu", Antonov Gallery, Yekaterinburg, Russia
2016 - "Poetlette", Kreutz Gallery, St.Petersburg, Russia
2016 - "Must have 2016", exhibition and shop-windows, Au Pont Rouge, St.Petersburg, Russia
2015 - "First Date", Beatnik Gallery , St.Petersburg, Russia
2014 - "Hmm...", Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, St.Petersburg, Russiа
2011 - "Bearded Lady", Kulturra Gallery, St.Petersburg, Russiа
2009 - "Fashion Mutation", Loft-project Etagi, St.Petersburg, Russia
Group exhibitions
2023 - "Something new, something borrowed", Serene Gallery, Lugano, Switzerland
2020 - "Skin U", Antonov Gallery, St.Petersburg, Russia
2018 - "Circus Circus Circus", ART4 Gallery (curator Andrey Bartenev), Moscow, Russia
2018 - "Jazz threesome", M-Gallery, Rostov, Russia
2017 - "Little black dress", M-Gallery, Rostov, Russia
2016 - "Strips", M-Gallery, Rostov, Russia
2016 - "Portrait of happy people", "Zdes na Taganke" Gallery (curator Andrey Bartenev), Moscow, Russia
2015 - "12 chairs", Rostov Regional Museum of Fine Arts, Russia