Anton Konukhov
Anton Konukhov was born in 1978 and graduated from St.Petersburg Academy of Art and Design. He worked at the Nepokoryonnye (Unvanquished) 17 studio and participated in the parallel events program for Manifesta 10, as well as the group exhibitions Prospekt Nepokoryonnykh (Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art) and The “Unvanquished” in Time and Space (Gromov House of Culture). He has held solo exhibitions in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
Anton works at the confluence of paintings and objects, creating a canvas that acquires sculptural characteristics thanks to its metallized color combinations. Flowing, reflecting and distorting the visible, it is as if Konukhov’s painting wants to go outside its own boundaries, conquer the external space, and re-encode the relationships that exist within it.
The sprawling background of the history of twentieth-century art can be seen in Konukhov’s work. The geometrism of American minimalist sculpture enters into a dialog with the post-minimalist idea of “anti-form” – liberated material – and also with the Italian arte povera’s play with texture. In continuing the reflection on the relationship between material, artist, and viewer that are intrinsic in these ideas, the artist structures his own expression of reality: to him the world is diverse and mutable. But it is this accident – “objectified” in the solidified, gold-cast streams – that is, from Konyukhov’s standpoint, a means of conveying the idea of time as it truly is: universal and ubiquitous.
