Igor Skaletski (b. 1978) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Moscow, Tel Aviv, Berlin and London.
Born in Voronezh in 1978, at the age of 13 he emigrated to Israel with his parents. In 2006 Skaletski took part in his first group project, the ‘Power’ exhibition of young art held at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Even then the purpose of his works was designated by the curators as an ‘associative search based on emotional experience’. A few years later, in 2008, Skaletski received his baccalaureate from the Surikov Moscow State Academic Art Institute, studying in the workshop of Tatiana Nazarenko. In 2009 Skaletski’s first small solo exhibition was held at the Moscow MEL Space, and in subsequent years his works were presented at group and personal expositions in Moscow, Kaliningrad, Tel Aviv, Paris and Stockholm, as well as at art fairs around the world.
Skaletski’s favourite technique for many years has been digital collage with elements of painting, which immersed the viewer in a phantasmagorical world of grotesque images borrowed from the global mass media and classical Western European culture. The artist’s method is a combination or juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible visual series borrowed from high and low cultures, which together generates new, paradoxical, defiant, strident images on the verge of vulgarity and kitsch.
Recently, having started working exclusively with the Alina Pinsky Gallery, he turned to painting, where the grotesque is combined with expressionistic bright colour and a surreal arrangement of perceptive planes.
