Fedor Petryk is an artist working in the media of painting, graphics, sculpture, and ceramics.
Fedor was born in Sevastopol, and then moved with his family to North Ossetia, where he graduated from the Vladikavkaz Art School named after Azanbek Dzhanaev.
From childhood, Fedor takes the position of an observer, who then builds concepts of new worlds, creatures and phenomena based on the images he sees. However, the artist's channel of observation of life is becoming a stock, mass-oriented information flow - outdoor advertising, social media feeds, popular science TV shows. Plunging into the world of representation and simulacra, Fedor does not criticize what he sees, as, for example, the radicalism of the Frankfurt School does, but rethinks ridiculous and straightforward advertising images and develops their alternative history. The artist oscillates between the ideological power of flat media images and their serious presence in human reality, returning funny dogs and amoebas to the space of sincerity through meta-irony.
The figurative series is characterized mainly by the animalistic genre. Such works as "Hard Choice", "Pepsicol Antelope", "Big Fish" refer to images of pop culture, but the visual language of metamodern is manifested in the artist's attention to detail, in the materiality and realism of the image.
“For me, color is an accent to attract attention. Like animals: brightly colored creatures that show by their appearance - I'm dangerous, don't touch me. But at the same time, this color is attractive, we want to look, to possess it.”
The images of animals seem to deny the presence of a person in this world - we understand this when we turn to the sculptural series of Fedor. Naive anthropomorphic characters: "Chelobrek", "Vasyok" and "The Wanderer", imitating the circulation of Koons, in their depths reveal the drama of the search for the Nietzschean superman. This drama is devoid of theatrical pathos, it is a native reflection on the events of the surrounding reality.
A series of abstract works becomes a transformation of the artist's ideas about the macro- and microcosm according to Bergson's scheme of the evolution of reality, and are fragments of a new space. "Lonely Mountain", "Turquoise Formula" and "Cubo Birth" are a game with geometry and universal form, which is present in Kazimir Malevich's Suprematism and Anish Kapoor's minimalism. However, Petrik endows the symbolic form with a living essence, being, in fact, engaged in the alchemical transformation of a visual image into a spiritual substance.
