#soviet union
С Днём Советской Армии и Военно-морского Флота!
Newspaper kiosk on Marx Prospect in Moscow (1971)
Газетный киоск на Проспекте Маркса в Москве (1971)
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Anfisa Reztsova, Tamara Tikhonova, Svetlana Nageikina and Nina Gavrylyuk - Olympic ski relay champions. XV Winter Olympic Games in Calgary (1988).
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Southern Train Station in Kaliningrad, Russia (1991)
Южный вокзал. Калининград. РСФСР. СССР. 1991 год.
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Figure skating school at the Young Pioneers stadium. Photo by Vladislav Mikosha (Moscow, 1936).
Школа фигурного катания. Фото Владислава Микоши. 1936 год.
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Fictional mission / Space That Never Was / Alternate timeline
Two cosmonauts conducting a spacewalk to replace damaged piece of equipment mounted on the outer hull of the Ambition 2 spacecraft.
Ambition 2 / Mars-Phobos
In the mid 80s, international cooperation between USSR, USA, Japan and a few European countries resulted in a follow-up to successful Ambition 1 mission from a few years earlier. This time the goal was to visit and explore one of Mars moons, Phobos, in hope to find a suitable place for a permanent base on its surface, which would be built by the crew of Ambition 3, mission that would launch in late 1980s.
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As always, prints of my artworks are available in my print shop at Artstationand at Displate.com
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Ilya’s Ten Characters albums were a series of narrative drawings made from 1970-4. Each album revolves around the life of an imaginary figure, including commentaries by their friends and casual observers. The characters tend to be isolated and lonely artists, and their fantastical stories embody different strategies for survival within a totalitarian regime.
The drawings themselves depicted abstract internal and external spaces comprising lines and circles. Sometimes these were in the forms of the fly like mandala of an earlier painting. These abstract spaces could also become the grids used to structure their paintings, and how the spaces in their paintings covered. This grid structure is also applied or a reference to official documents, with their tables and grid structures.
I always find the phrase ‘strategies for survival’ quite exciting. I think it’s the suggestion of needing to analyse and understand the specific potential threats and dangers of a social or political environment.
In a totalitarian regime this must be easy – i’m not being flippant, it’s the survival, and the strategies that enable that survival, that is difficult. In a society such as ours, the survival at a rudimentary level is easy, but perceiving the threats and dangers is harder, less easy to police. They may be intrinsic to living.
