Sanya Kantarovsky works across the fields of film, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and curating, with painting at the centre of his practice. His approach to painting is iterative and intuitive, working through successive versions of a motif, with a layered process of addition and erasure. In painting especially, Kantarovsky’s surfaces can take on various forms, ranging from evaporated pools of solvent and paint to thick impasto or chalky flatness, reminiscent of fresco or clay. These mediated processes serve to widen the gap between the hand and the surface, obscuring technique.

His subject matter is borne of a meandering line of inquiry that engages with historical practices of painters, writers, or even choreographers. This throughline finds its way across the artist’s own lived experience, leaning on a wide range of dissonant philosophical, political, and spiritual conventions around the human subject.

The effect of the artist’s scenes is often one of overidentification between a represented body, the painter, and the viewer. Feelings of compassion or revulsion are often marked by humour, while scenes of harm or cruelty may be marked by desire. A familiar saying: behind every fear is a wish. There is a certain kernel of ambivalence that seems to precede the way Kantarovsky’s work yearns to spill out from its plane, unresolved and uninhibited.

Sanya Kantarovsky was born in Moscow in 1982 and emigrated to New York City when he was ten years old, where he continues to live and work. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Modern Art, Paris (2023); Aspen Art Museum (2022); Modern Art, London (2021); Kunsthalle Basel (2018); and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2017). He has participated in recent group exhibitions at Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle (2022); the FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2021); the Drawing Center, New York (2020); the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2019); and ICA Boston (2018). His works are held in collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Bualo; the Courtauld Gallery, London; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn, Washington, D.C.; LACMA, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.