Sergey Kononov
b. 1994
Odessa, Ukraine

Sergey Kononov has captured the attention of the media with his distinct painterly style really fast. Working with traditional media is a difficult task in the contemporary moment since the domination of other forms of art, but by precisely extracting his observations of everyday reality this youngster accentuated the never ending power of painting. Kononov’s apparent focus of bodily manifestations of mental restlessness suggests the artist’s decision to handle his personal position in the social and even political context. Such an approach quickly was recognized and marked Kononov as Ukrainian art prodigy. Trained from an early age in the traditional methods of Ukrainian academic painting, Kononov inherits and problematizes a fund of technical expertise transmitted from the 19th century. Bringing this to bear on the depiction of contemporary subjects, he probes the social history embedded in the formal conventions of realist painting and its equivocal relationship to contemporary media, fashion, eroticism and youth culture.