Kirill Basalaev

Kirill Basalaev was born in 1988 in Tomsk, Siberia. He studied at the Tomsk State University (faculty of Art and Culture) until 2009 and then continued his education in Moscow at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Art Theory faculty) in 2014-2015.

The author works with such mediums as abstract paintings, sculptures, and video art. The works of Kirill Basalaev are mainly based on the theme of the urban environment and a human in it. The city is introduced as a living structure, where shards, cracks, and breaks are evidence of its “vitality". Becoming a witness of these processes, Kirill not only registers them on the surface of a canvas but also as if fixes, “remembers" himself at a particular point. During many years of his artistic practice, Basalaev reached the conclusion that memory is inseparable from a place and the memory of a place is the basis of any memories. Thus, your memory of yourself becomes the memory of memories of the places.

In his early works, Basalaev focused on real places and city walls, which he reproduces on a canvas. Using building materials such as cement, plaster, and enamel he copied each photographed shard and crack in order to point out the fragility of urban space, its man- made nature and mortality.

The artist's practice continued in a series of deliberately brightly coloured works. Layers of plaster mixed with acrylic allowed Basalaev to move away from the physical space of the urban environment and its direct connection with a person and focus on the sensory experience of a place. As a result, the theme of the constantly changing city becomes an experience of the trauma of a place where shards, cracks and scratches are only a metaphor for humanity in the city.

In 2021, after the peak of COVID-19 and the global “freezing" of people in squeezed spaces, Basalaev was forced to reconstruct the image of a “place" while working in isolation and went through the experience of space as his own experience. This series is called “Archeology of Disease".

The year 2022 was marked for Basalaev as a relocation year because of the war. After several months in different countries, the artist moved to the UK. Now Kirill lives and works

in London. The current series of works "The Retention of Memory" continues research on the theme of memory fragility. Canvases are created by excluding the author from the process of destruction. As human memories are layered on top of each other, layers of plaster and cement are laid down on mesh and then partially destroyed in the process of tearing of the mesh. The result is glued back to the canvas without the artist's changes.