Aleksandr Dashevskiy
Aleksandr Dashevskiy (b.1980) works with different art media but is primarily known as a painter. Back in 2013 he was on the list of the seven most investment-friendly young Russian artists according to the Forbes magazine.
The task of finding various opportunities for working in the field of contemporary art becomes a major challenge for the author. The challenging technique becomes a tool that allows you to pay attention to subjects well-known yet kept out from the public gaze realm. In the 2000s Alexander Dashevskiy created a series about Soviet standard houses, often unpopular with their residents, eager for up-to-date comfort.
Then he painted preposterously majestic Soviet swimming pools and other buildings of the Soviet modernism, which fell into decay. However, neither of these portrayals are about nostalgia. They were more about things which remain in our everyday experience and continue to shape it but they are not being built in the present, people suffer from them or try to ignore them, preferring to hope that everything will change on its own. The artist works not only with history, which remains unreinterpreted and traumatic. The shadows of the past live together with the shadows of the present.
Today, Russian political environment keeps generating bizarre and unreal events, which nevertheless are absolutely real. Many of the artist's works are focused on the different ways of living through this situation, which he converts into plots, almost allegorical. However, the author rarely reveals how to decode his works, occasionally coming up with new ones, which is consistent in its own way. The plots evoke a search for new artistic techniques. Recently, the artist has been inventing various forms a lot: he makes irregularly shaped canvas stretchers for his paintings to look like self-glowing formations, he divides images into fragments, making them unstable, or, vice versa, he transforms his work into an hyper-realistic trompe-l'œil, adding a painted shadow to it.
In 2016, his work "Elektrosila" won the first prize at Arte Laguna Prize, in painting section. His works are represented in collections of the State Russian Museum (Saint-Petersburg), Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Moscow), "Tsarskoselskaya collection" Museum (Saint-Petersburg), Krasnoyarsk Museum Center (Krasnoyarsk), as well as in private collections in Russia, USA, Germany, England, France, Holland, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Israel.
