2023, from the Unveiled series
The visual universe of Kirill Makarov consists of images created according to all the rules of academic painting, on which layers of modern visual culture are superimposed with imprints of new media: video games, photos and videos from news feeds and instant messengers (often – from the conflict zones). The implicit heterogeneity of his works is determined by the unusual structure of the composition and the multidimensionality of visual plans aspiring to comprehend rapidly changung visuality of now. In his work Kirill raises questions about complex relationship between the real and the virtual and about the representation of evidence in media through which our reality is being formed. Kirill Makarov collects the data of eyewitness of the events and their display in mass media and puts them into virtual 3d models, trying to find matches between the real event and its representation. His art can be seen as a warning: virtuality creates a prototype of social relations and interactions, such training before reality. At the same time, «Virtuality makes it possible to prototype social relationships and interactions, a kind of training for the real. At the same time, it invites the user into the space of the imaginary, which he can perceive as safe, but this safety is illusory, – Kirill Makarov says, – […] the virtual environment it is limited by the written code, the will and imagination of the one who controlled its writing.»
Kirill Makarov is an artist , born in Leningrad in 1988. Graduated from Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design. In 2011, he held his first solo exhibition — Secret Level. The first exhibition of paintings by Kirill was in Moscow at the Start Young Art Site of the Winzavod Contemporary Art Center (2013). Elbow Room Project, shown in the parallel program of the European Manifesto Biennale in St. Petersburg in 2014, marked the artist’s fascination with the latest media: in his art he tries to synthesize a digital image with painting.
A logical continuation becomes the participation in the Russian Kirill practices working with various media, including painting and computer graphics, explores game engines, the emergence and production of relationships between humans, images and machines. By using different graphic languages, he creates hybrid spaces in which natural, artificial, algorithmically produced objects and actors coexist, subordinate to a function that digitally retains traces of discarded impressions, minor gestures and past events, trying to convey a sense of atomized attention in the space of machine «care» about time and reconstruction of experience in objects of digital morphogenesis.
Contemporary Art Triennale in 2017, where the artist showed an augmented reality painting from the series ―It will rain, my body, hands and legs will be chopping up. This was followed by the personal project ―Marching rays, convincingly illuminated volumes, the material is unilluminated, subsurface scattering, NPC under IBL in Moscow Triangle Gallery in 2017. In 2019, he had an exhibition jointly with Xeniya Kononenko ―13.690353, 18.834137, 1638391.625000 and in 2021 solo project The Speech of the Transparency Dictat. The artist participated in the exhibitions ―No Time (Moscow, 2015); ― Orgy of Things (Moscow, 2017), ―After Us (Ekaterinburg, 2019);― Generation XXI. (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2020); ― 20:20 Time has stood still»(Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2020) and others.
He was a scholar of the grant program of Garage Museum for artists working in the field of contemporary art (2012–2013), artist-in-residence of the Abbey of La Pres (France), Vyksa Art-Residence (Vyksa, 2019) and Workshops and Art Residencies of Garage Museum (Moscow, 2019). His art works are in collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantin Sorokin Foundation (Moscow), Credit Suisse (Switzerland) and others.
Now he lives and works in Paris.
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