NK Gallery is pleased to present ARTISTS OF THE GALLERY. SELECTED WORKS, the group exhibition, aligned with the celebration of the 3rd birthday of the gallery, founded in May 2012. Featuring new works by six main artists of the gallery: Kirill Chelushkin, Nick Ervinck, Alexei Kostroma, Didier Mahieu, Ivan Razumov, Hans Vandekerckhove, the show reveals the spectrum of their creative visions.
Kirill Chelushkin (°1968, lives and works in Paris and Moscow) gifted a brilliant graphic skill, has created for the gallery large-scale works with graphite on canvas. Though sober in colour, they produce striking theatrical effect: the figures of women, the warriors of beauty, appear to be lit by the stage light, ‘Waiting’. The artist had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the USA. His works are included in leading public and private collections, such as The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Itabishi Art Museum, Tokio; Bolzano Art Museum, Bolzano, Italy; Hero Hermes Collection, France; Bernard Arnault collection, France; ‘Ekaterina’ Foundation, Russia.
Nick Ervinck (°1981, lives and works in Lichtervelde, BE) puzzles, similar to a Rorschach test, the mind of the viewer with 3D-print sculptures, the outcome of the artist’s fascination with artificial, biologic and robotic elements. Except from his unlimited digital sketchbook, reproduced, mirrored, distorted, his organic imagery is reminiscent of the endoskeleton of the new life born through digital technology. Ervinck’s works have been shown is solo and group exhibitions in Belgium, Netherlands, UK, France, USA, China. The laureate of multiply art awards, he has been commissioned to create works for numerous public institutions.
Alexei Kostroma (°1962, lives and works in Berlin, GE), Russian artist, who proclaimed in the early 1990s an organic trend in art, continues the ‘Yellow Earth Series’ with his signature yellow lemon pigment of own receipt, by its significant energetic impact comparable to Yves Klein Blue. The works of Kostroma are held in the collections of established institutions, amongst others in the State Hermitage, Saint-Petersburg (RU), the State Russian Museum, Saint-Petersburg (RU), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL), Moscow House of Photography Museum, Moscow (RU). His works have been sold through Sotheby’s and published in the catalogues of Phillips de Pury, in London and Moscow.
Didier Mahieu (°1961, lives and works in Mons, BE) treats the medium of painting, according to the late curator Willy Van den Bussche, in a romantic way. There seem to be a story behind every painting, like that of a departure on a sail journey in the miniature series ‘La Récit’, or a fictional reality, reminiscent of subconscious or underwater world on the large scale canvas with the according title ‘Undersoul’. Works of Didier Mahieu are held in numerous private and public collections in Belgium and abroad, amongst others in the collections of The National Bank of Belgium, the collection of French Community, Museum of Fine Arts in Mons, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille.
Ivan Razumov (°1972, lives and works in Moscow, RU) translates his spontaneous and ironic look on the art scene into the light-hearted ink drawings on paper, hence the title ‘Soviet Art Market Pioneers Pushing False Malevich to Western Collectors’. The artist has been exhibited amongst others in Foundation La Maison Rouge Paris, Stedelijke Museum Amsterdam, MMoMA Moscow. His works are included in public collections (i.e. Centre Pompidou, Paris) and in private collections in USA, UK, Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Russia.
Hans Vandekerckhove (°1957, lives and works in Gent, BE) being himself a philosopher and inspired by the spiritual minimalism of Mies Van der Rohe, diffuses the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in his canvases. The eye penetrates via the blurred enclosure of a room, a shelter, through ‘Window to the West’ into the metaphorical mountain landscape. A figure, multiplied by its own reflection and opposed to light (like in ‘Into the Light. Into the Night’), could be found in the artist’s new architectural series. Vandekerckhove’s paintings are held in public collections, amongst others of Museum Kortrijk, Museum of Modern Art Ostend, Museum Midden (GE), Flemish Government, Central Bank of Europe, and in private collections in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, USA, Singapore.