CV

Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko

Born in 1998 in Kharkiv, Ukraine
Resides and works in Milan, Italy

Education:

2023-……. MA Painting, Brera Academy, Milan, Italy
2019-2022   MA Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, Italy
2015-2019   BA Industrial Design, Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, Kharkiv, Ukraine

Selected exhibitions:

2024 SGUARDI III, ABC-ARTE, Milan, Italy [group exhibition]
Your Edless Summer, Galerie SABINE BAYASLI, Paris, France [group exhibition]
AMICA - THE ART ISSUE. Il Corpo Artistico, Brera Academy, Milan, Italy [art prize]
2023       Paramnesia, Marsèll Paradise, Milan, Italy (solo exhibition)
              ReA! 2023, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, Italy (art fair)
              Still Waving, Port Tonic Art Center, Roquebrune-sur-Argens, France (group exhibition)
2022       Extraneous, EXILE, Vienna, Austria (group exhibition)
2020       Free Wall Space, Free Wall space [link], online exhibition (group exhibition)
2019       June, Vovatanya Gallery, Kharkiv, Ukraine (two-person exhibition)
              The Importance of Being Earnest, Municipal Gallery, Kharkiv, Ukraine (group exhibition)

Residencies:

2024 Lami-Genolini, Erba, Italy
2023       Port Tonic Art Center, Roquebrune-sur-Argens, France

Selected press:

Kate Sutton, “Extraneous” in Artforum [link] (December 2022).
Àngels Miralda, “The True Story of Kelet: Curated By 2022” in Echo Gone Wrong  [link] (October 2022).
Giulia Profeti, “Blackout Book #1. La mostra di NABA su Artribune” in Artribune [link] (May 2021).

Born in 1998 in Kharkiv, Nazar grew up in an obliquus political context echoing the USSR's chimerical narratives and representations. Since middle school, Nazar has started translating his life experience by continuously drawing. A fate-infused encounter with an art professor close to his family and the subsequent drawing and painting classes, portraying sessions of plaster heads, and long conversations sparked a radicated devotion to painting and its history. Following his graduation in Industrial Design in his hometown, Nazar's dedication brought him to study in Italy, magnetized by the country's artistic heritage and the possibility of tangibly diving into Italian Renaissance and Baroque. Nazar's spirit of observation, his penchant for fantasy and the transnational academic experience activated a pictorial language in which classical references intertwine with atemporal symbols to become collective déjà-vus.

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The Ukrainian artist's approach is one of a scientist who experiments in his laboratory. Deeply aware of the materials he is mixing, Nazar doesn't aim to control the result, willingly leaving room for synchronicities. And so amidst steamy explosions and discoveries, a unicorn horn grows out of stuffed pork, a clown nose defuses a Socrate-sque portrait (of his father), and a feather smoothens the seriousness of Donetsk Toy Factory's soldiers. The ever-present playfulness that sprouts in each painting plays footsie with a classical European aesthetic, emphasized by the use of traditional oil colours, most of which he prepares on his own. The limited choice of traditional pigments sets a fundamental limit that allows Nazar to let the associations be triggered by the possibility of their representation and transformation in time. The azurite blue will slowly become green as the memory of a first kiss fades until our lover's features become those of Botticelli's Venus.

Vittoria de Franchis