Andrey Lyubchenko is a contemporary artist whose practice explores the relationship between painting, image, surface, memory and hidden narrative. His work moves between abstraction and figuration, creating visually layered compositions that invite the viewer to look closely and discover ambiguous forms, traces, and emotional tension. His artistic language is rooted in painting and shaped by an interest in texture, visual perception, symbolic fragments and the transformation of recognizable imagery into complex painterly structures.

Artist statement

selected works

IN PINK LIGHT
2024–2026

A series of paintings exploring ideas of representation, prestige, and symbolic significance. The visual language is built around iconic images of fountains, fireworks, trophies, and other symbols of status, drawing inspiration from early eighteenth-century engravings.

“Obelisk and fountain” canvas/oil 160х120

“Little Flower” canvas/oil 60х40

“Colonnade” canvas/oil 60х40

“Fallen Obelisk” canvas/oil 60х40

“Fountain and fireworks” canvas/oil 160x120

IN PINK
LIGHT
2024–2026

These status symbols are deliberately reoriented to reveal an alternative symbolic dimension. Rather than serving solely as displays of vitality and machismo, they simultaneously expose their own theatricality. Behind the gleam of trophies and the spectacle of fireworks, the viewer discovers a stage set—a carefully constructed gesture designed for an audience. The works invite us to look beyond triumph itself and instead consider its backstage reality: the props and visual devices that lose their grandeur once removed from the ceremonial context.

At the same time, the series functions as a private marker of ambition, fear, and expectation. Viewers may recognize their own ideas of success within these images, while also questioning whether those ideals are as universal as they seem.

FOREST AFFAIRS
2024–2025

This series explores the theme of censorship through botanical imagery, ranging from the intimate scale of flower petals and stems to the vast, seemingly boundless space of the forest.

“Forest God” canvas/oil 120х165

“Forest God II” canvas/oil 160х130

Untitled paper/acrylic 60х50

“Letter to Xerxes”
fabric/acrylic 160х60

“Philosopher’s Stone I” canvas/acrylic 110х125

FOREST AFFAIRS
2024–2025

The flower functions as a symbolic veil. It recalls, for instance, the heraldic flowers found on coats of arms, where floral motifs serve as attributes that represent—or even substitute for—their owners. At the same time, the flower becomes an image of perpetual desire that ultimately turns into frustration. In Flower 2, for example, the subject is magnified and blurred to such an extent that the viewer is left with little more than a rhythmic arrangement of colour and form.

This logic gradually expands into the image of the forest—a place that disorients, conceals, and invites one to lose one's way. The symbolic qualities of the forest are transferred to the broader theme of censorship, creating a visual parallel between physical and ideological obscurity.

The works maintain a deliberately restrained visual language, marked by a sense of dignified pathos and quiet solemnity. Within this apparent neutrality, the face of censorship slowly begins to emerge. Veiled by a fig leaf, it gradually takes shape within the forest landscape, ultimately giving rise to the ruler of these confusing spaces—a mythical forest deity who embodies concealment, disorientation, and control.

“An Easy Way to Avoid Punishment” canvas/acrylic 160х160

“Double Portrait” canvas/oil 50х70

“The Knight in the Tiger's Skin” fabric/acrylic 50х60

“Triple portrait” paper/oil 70х70

“Playing with a Pet” canvas/oil 150х180

AUTO
2025-2026

The series spans a wide emotional spectrum—from anecdotal irony to care, from fear to moments of quiet enlightenment. These contrasting states are conveyed through painterly means, while the visual framework is rooted in the imagery of the road—a subject that offers a rich metaphorical language for the themes explored throughout the series.

AUTO
2025-2026

The image of the automobile is particularly fertile for artistic investigation. On the one hand, the light of a car's headlights can be understood as a guiding light, offering hope and illuminating the path ahead. On the other, it is also a constant reminder of vulnerability, evoking the ever-present fear of traffic accidents and their consequences.

Within this thematic field, I continue to develop the characters of my own evolving mythology. The series also expands to include the broader vocabulary of the road—such as vehicle convoys—as well as everyday artefacts associated with traffic culture. These include pedestrian safety devices, such as reflective bunny-shaped reflectors, which are transformed into symbolic elements within the visual narrative.

STUDIO & WORKS IN MOTION

Biography

artistic practice

Andrey Lyubchenko (b. 1999, St. Petersburg) is a Russian artist whose practice explores the intersection of the sacred, the miraculous, and the everyday.

In 2017, he graduated from the St. Petersburg Academic Art Lyceum named after B. V. Ioganson, affiliated with the Academy of Arts.

From 2017 to 2024, he studied at the Painting Department of the Ilya Repin St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, where he is currently pursuing postgraduate studies.

Since his academic training in painting, Lyubchenko has consistently engaged with ideas of spirituality, transcendence, and the miraculous. Over time, these concerns have developed into distinct bodies of work in which the sacred is examined through shifting visual contexts.

In the series Forest Affairs (2024–2025), these ideas are approached through the notion of censorship. Nature becomes an ambiguous space capable of concealing, confusing, and disorienting, transforming the landscape into both a physical and psychological territory.

In the ongoing series Auto (2025–present), the spiritual and sacred are filtered through the visual language of roads and automobile culture. What was previously perceived as distant and transcendent enters the realm of everyday experience: sacred light becomes the glare of headlights, while transcendence itself acquires an ambiguous character, at times revealing a darker and even fatal dimension.

In 2026, Lyubchenko began the series In the Pink Light, turning to symbolically and semantically charged imagery inspired by eighteenth-century celebratory engravings. Fireworks, fountains, obelisks, and coats of arms enter his visual vocabulary as ceremonial and status-bearing symbols traditionally associated with vitality, triumph, and celebration. Within this heightened atmosphere, however, their meanings begin to shift and invert: what once appeared as a firework may now resemble an explosion, and an explosion, in turn, may take on the appearance of celebration.

Across these bodies of work, Lyubchenko examines how the sacred persists within contemporary visual experience, moving between transcendence and everyday life, attraction and danger, celebration and catastrophe.

education

2022 — “Painting from the Methodological Fund”
2021 — “Academic Study and Quick Drawing”
2021 — “Painting from the Methodological Fund”, Yekaterinburg, Russia
2021 — “Igor Petrov. Educational Setups”
2021 — Deus XXI
2020 — “Academic Study and Quick Drawing”
2019 — “Painting from the Methodological Fund”
2019 — “Academic Study and Quick Drawing”
2018 — “Painting from the Methodological Fund”