ABOUT BONDAREV
Sergey Aleksandrovich Bondarev (born in Sverdlovsk, USSR on November 1, 1980)
Artist, painter, graphic artist, sculptor.
He 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.
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.
Biography
Parents
Father, Aleksandr Bondarev, has worked most of his life as a stage and scenery engineer at the Sverdlovsk Academic Drama Theater.
Mother, Tatiana Bondareva, is a puppet theater actress, stage speech teacher, and children's theater director.
Education
1986 to 1994 — student of general education school No. 138 in Ekaterinburg, Russia 1990 to 1994 — student of the children's art school of the Shadr Sverdlovsk Art College
1994 to 1998 — student of the Shadr Sverdlovsk Art College, major: industrial graphic artist
1998 to 2004 — student of Ekaterinburg Academy of Architecture and Arts, major: muralist.
Artistic Journey
In his student years, Sergey tried his hand as an illustrator in a glossy magazine, after which he was invited to the position of the art director in the same publishing house.
At the same time, he worked by profession as a muralist and was engaged in creating murals of interiors of private houses and public facilities.
After a brilliant graduation from the academy in 2005, Bondarev moved to Moscow where he worked as a freelance illustrator and editor for several major glossy magazines in the capital.
The fashion industry welcomed Sergey, and in 2006, at the invitation of the Marmalade clothing brand, he moved to Istanbul to work in the brand's design office, taking the office of the art director and artist. In parallel with his main work, he created a series of portraits of fashion icons: Yves Saint Laurent 2007 and others.
In 2007, he created his own clothing brand, Bearded Baby, whose style is art-plus-fashion. Bondarev put his drawings on clothes and presented his first collection in Moscow at the Russian Fashion Week. Through this he met the artist Vlad Mamyshev Monroe, who became his inspiration and friend. Later they created a collaborative transformation project.
In 2008, Sergey Bondarev and his friend Aleksey Anisimov came to Saint Petersburg, where they created the KultuRRa Creative Association, which promoted creative initiatives in the field of fashion and art.
Later, in 2009, Bondarev's first solo exhibition – Fashion Mutation – opened at the Etagi Loft Project. The photo project focuses on the life and transformations of the "bearded baby". The project was produced by Svetlana Bekasova and curated by Irena Kuksenaite.
In the same year, KultuRRa opened its own space in the Passage shopping center in Nevsky Avenue. It became the venue for exhibition projects, artist residencies, lectures, showrooms, round tables, and the place of a new concept store for Russian designers – KultuRRa Space.
For creating the project, Sergey was nominated for the TOP-50: St. Petersburg's Most Famous People award in 2010, and appeared on the cover of Sobaka.ru magazine.
In 2011, the artist's second solo exhibition – Bearded Lady 97-79 – took place at the KultuRRa Space and told the story of the transformation of a "bearded baby" into a woman. The exhibition featured textile objects and video art, the main parts in which were played by the artist's muse Anna Petukhova and writer Marusya Klimova.
In 2012, Sergey was once more nominated for the TOP-50: St. Petersburg's Most Famous People award.
In 2013, he returned to active painting and over the course of a year created a series of works, which he presented at the Erarta Museum in November 2014. The Hmm exhibition immersed the viewers in the atmosphere of global consumption, where red shoes became an object of lust. "Hmm" is not only an interjection, but also the word "fashion" in Russian (moda) without the letter "o"; something between fashion and art, the very edge on which the artist had been walking for the last few years.
This project marks the beginning of the artist's creative success. The famous Spanish collection SOLO bought several of his paintings for its own space in Madrid. Sergey met his main collector Nadezhda Babicheva, who currently has about fifty of his works in her private collection. The American contemporary art portal Artsy.net published an editorial about Sergey's work.
In the summer of 2015, the second large solo exhibition – First Date – took place at the St. Petersburg branch of the Moscow project Solyanka, Beatnik Gallery. The exhibition occupied three large halls. This time Sergey managed to completely transform the gallery space: he didn't just place the works in a ready-made exhibition space, but reshaped its interior to suit the exhibition's objectives. The project describes how feelings change from the first to the last date and emphasizes the importance of every moment in life.
For the First Date exhibition, Sergey was nominated for the third time for the TOP-50: St. Petersburg's Most Famous People award, and won in the Artist of the Year category.
The same year, Bondarev took part in three group exhibitions, one of which was curated by the well-known artist Andrey Bartenev. The Portraits of Happy People exhibition was held at the Zdes na Taganke Gallery in Moscow, Russia.
Thanks to cooperation with international agents and online platforms for the sale and promotion of contemporary art (Artsy.net, 1stdibs.com, Artsper.com), collectors and art lovers all over the world have begun to purchase Sergey's works. The geography of sales is very wide: from Europe and America to China, Singapore, and Qatar.
In 2016, Helsinki Fashion Week (Finland) invited Sergey Bondarev to become the main artist of the year and be responsible for the visual design of all events during the Fashion Week in Finland.
In 2016, Bondarev received an offer to create a collaboration project with the luxury department store Au Pont Rouge (At the Red Bridge). The project included an exhibition inside the department store and the decoration of all the windows in the artist's signature style. The project was called MUST HAVE 2016 and included collages printed on aluminum and hand-embroidered panels telling about stereotypes and society's pressure on people. Must Have: you must have, you must be, you must always owe something to everyone, even if you don't want it. About seven hundred people visited on the exhibition's opening day, and the management of the department store extended its cooperation with the artist for one more season. Bondarev has twice created conceptual windows for Au Pont Rouge. The second season's collaboration was called Baroque Theater of the Bauhaus.
Participation in the Art Basel art fair in Hong Kong.
Collaboration between the artist and the premium whisky brand Auchentoshan. Sergey created merchandise items inspired by his own works.
That same year, another solo exhibition, Poetlette, a total installation opened at the Kreutz Gallery in a huge St. Petersburg attic space. The project presented hand-made decorative panels of different sizes embroidered with sequins. This is the artist's original technique: a painstaking and meditative process. Embroidery of each work took up to 200 hours. The finished panels looked like Byzantine mosaics; however, Sergey put advertising pictures from a photobank into the "icons" instead of the saints' faces.
The Mikhailovsky Theater, an opera and ballet theater in St. Petersburg, offered Sergey a collaboration to create posters for Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème opera.
The next solo project took place in 2018. This time, Bondarev exhibited in his hometown of Ekaterinburg, at Antonov Gallery with the Château Perdu (The Hidden Castle) exhibition. A grim but cozy tale inspired by the unusual Catholic cult of adorning jewelry and richly dressed skeletons from the Roman catacombs.
Along with this, the sculptor and gallery owner Grigory Orekhov, offered Sergey a collaboration with the Orekhov Gallery in Moscow. The opening of the Lilac Ladies exhibition took place in September 2018. The artist focused attention on the lilac color as the embodiment of kitsch. Ladies who are the heroines of all Bondarev's works invite the audience to enjoy his personal universe. On its opening day the exhibition was visited by renowned persons of Moscow: Ivan Urgant, Alexandr Rogov, Margarita Pushkina, and others. The project enjoyed widespread media and commercial success and it was decided to make a second part, which opened in December 2018.
Bondarev's works were included in the collection of the showman and TV host Alexandr Rogov. The collaboration continued with the creation of prints for the clothing collection of the ROGOV brand.
The same year, the artist participated in two group projects: the Circus, Circus, Circus! exhibition at the ART4 Gallery in Moscow, and the Jazz Threesome exhibition at M-Gallery in Rostov-on-Don.
Sergey started to cooperate with famous Moscow decorators, interior designers and art consultants, such as Nadezhda Ananyeva (NG gallery), Irina Glik (Geometry), Ilya Gulyants (Elborn Studio) – this is how Sergey's works got into major design projects and on the pages of AD, Elle Decoration, and other magazines. The most noteworthy was the project of Arkady Novikov's SAVVA restaurant in the Metropol Moscow Hotel: the famous restaurateur purchased three paintings by Bondarev for this place.
Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich bought six works by Sergei Bondarev for his art collection.
In 2019, Antonov Gallery opened a new exhibition space in St. Petersburg. The first project that it hosted was Sergey Bondarev's False Mirrors exhibition, in which the artist demonstrated his love for distortions, use of equivocal language, and games with human forms.
The collaboration with the Antonov Gallery continued with the Anatomy of the Skeleton in the Closet exhibition, which opened in September 2019. The artist's paintings were accompanied by the sculptures by Andrey Antonov. The project is based on Sergey's works inspired by the illustrations from the Anatomy for the Artist Book by Jenő Barcsay, known to all academic artists. Bondarev reshaped the illustrations, collaging them with recipes from a Soviet cookbook, and presented his version of the anatomy atlas.
Right before the pandemic of 2020, Sergey participated in the Leather Bastards group exhibition at the Antonov Gallery. The exhibition featured decorative panels by Sergey Bondarev, paintings by Andrey Pakhomov, and textiles by Tatiana Kolpakova.
During the pandemic, Sergey Bondarev created a retrospective book called Susanna's Adventures. The memory book is dedicated to the 40th birthday of the artist and is a conventional report on forty years of the artist's creative journey. It tells the story about the beginning of that journey from birth, about maturing and training, about exhibition projects, about the main themes of work and inspiration. The book was presented in November 2021.
In January 2022, the artist came to Italy for a three-month residency at the invitation of the Casa degli Artisti Foundation (Milan). The result is a series of works entitled
Sciura Milanese. After three months in St. Petersburg, Sergey returned to Milan to continue working on the series, and became absorbed into the study of the works of the Italian Futurists for nine months.
In April 2022, Bondarev's solo exhibition – In the Cafe of Dancing Lights – opened at the CUBE Moscow in Moscow. In his new works Sergey jokes about beauty and shows it inside out.
In 2023, some of the works painted in Milan were sent to the Something New Something Borrowed exhibition at the Serene Gallery (Lugano, Switzerland).
In 2024, Sergey has started work on creating his own foundation, Fondazione Bondarev, with an off-line space in St. Petersburg.
…
Marusya Klimova about Sergey Bondarev
"There is an expression – "to overpaint something" or, in other words, "to paint the devil blacker than he really is". It refers to people who try to present the situation in a gloomy view, exaggerate the dangers or want to emphasize and unveil someone’s imperfections that other people may see as insignificant and barely noticeable. I think that’s exactly what Sergey Bondarev does when creating his works, and not only metaphorically, but also in the truest sense of the word: He overpaints, laying colors thick. Moreover, looking at his pictures, the thought that had never occurred to me came to my mind: This worn-out and overused expression came into general use from art of painting. Sergey Bondarev hardly ever uses mid-tones; he is infatuated with screaming colors, bright gaudy spots, hypertrophied and near-absurdity images, which, in their turn, are often borrowed by the artist from mass culture, which is foreign to the palette of nuances and subtleties. The world is full of simulacra, vulgarity, falsity, and trash, and Sergey Bondarev uses all these enthusiastically in his works, though, apparently, without any intention to uncover any immoral improprieties. On the contrary, he seems to offer the audience to follow his example and to dress in eye-catching and expressive, like his pictures, outfits to take a most active part in the action and to turn the sunk-in-vice performance society into a merry carnival." Marusya Klimova, writer
Exhibitions
2009 – Fashion Mutation solo exhibition, Etagi Loft Project, St. Petersburg, Russia;
2011 — Bearded Lady 97-79 solo exhibition, KultuRRa Gallery, St. Petersburg, Russia;
2014 — Hmm... solo exhibition, Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia;
2015 — 12 Chairs group exhibition, Rostov Regional Museum of Fine Arts, Rostov-on-Don, Russia;
2015 — First Date solo exhibition, Beatnik Gallery, St.Petersburg, Russia; 2016 — Must have 2016 solo exhibition, Au Pont Rouge Department Store, St. Petersburg, Russia;
2016 — Strips group exhibition, M-Gallery, Rostov-on-Don, Russia;
2016 — Portraits of Happy People group exhibition, Zdes na Taganke Gallery, Moscow, Russia;
2016 — Poetlette solo exhibition, Kreutz Gallery, St. Petersburg, Russia;
2017 — Little Black Dress group exhibition, M-Gallery, Rostov-on-Don, Russia;
2018 — Circus Circus Circus group exhibition, ART4 Gallery, Moscow, Russia;
2018 — Jazz Threesome group exhibition, M-Gallery, Rostov-on-Don, Russia;
2018 — Château Perdu solo exhibition, Antonov Gallery, Ekaterinburg, Russia; 2018 — Lilac Ladies solo exhibition, Orekhov Gallery, Moscow, Russia;
2019 — Lilac Ladies 2 solo exhibition, Orekhov Gallery, Moscow, Russia;
2019 — Anatomy of the Skeleton in the Closet solo exhibition, Antonov Gallery, St. Petersburg, Russia;
2019 — False Mirrors solo exhibition, Antonov Gallery, St. Petersburg, Russia; 2020 — Leather Bastards group exhibition, Antonov Gallery, St. Petersburg, Russia;
2022 — In the Cafe of Dancing Lights solo exhibition, CUBE Moscow, Moscow, Russia;
2023 — Something New, Something Borrowed group exhibition, Serene Gallery, Lugano, Switzerland.