Kirill Chelushkin was born on the outskirts of Moscow in 1968 and lives and works between Paris and Moscow. After training as an architect, he devoted himself to illustration and drawing. In the late 1990s, he made acquaintance with the artist and theorist Dimitry Goutov and his Livchitz Institute. This club for aesthetic and ideological reflection reinterprets the thinking of the Soviet art historian, Michael Livchitz, an ardent defender of socialist realism, and criticises the formalist deviances of modernism. This encounter encouraged Kirill Chelushkin to practice an art essentially visual, but more axed on the reality surrounding him. He made a series of drawings of Moscow seen through his car windscreen. «  Moscow Mood » describes a dark misty city like a nocturne by Whistler, an impressionist road movie in a city in complete chaos.

In 2005, Chelushkin took to sculpting figures in thick slabs of white polystyrene. In parallel, he continued his investigation into photography, video and drawing. In his recent installations he combines those techniques. Taking advantage of the light-absorbent qualities of polystyrene, he projects video footage onto sculptures specifically designed for this purpose. The expressionism of the angular cutouts of the material, which are evocative of brush strokes, lends the images an unprecedented and striking pictorial quality. 

Author: Alice Cazaux