Vladimir Grishchenkov was born on May 30, 1972 in Moscow. He is a Russian artist, painter, graphic artist, photographer, and teacher. He graduated from the Moscow Art College in memory of 1905 - Design Department (1986 - 1990), and the Moscow State Pedagogical University - Art and Graphic Faculty (1990 - 1995). In 1992, he joined the International Federation of Artists (IFA). At the turn of the 1990-2000s, he repeatedly exhibited in Russia and abroad: the Malaya Gruzinskaya 28 gallery, the Novy Kovcheg gallery, the Poly Line gallery, the Moscow Trading House gallery, The Lobby Gallery, New York, USA. In 2011, he took part in the pre-auction exhibition and auction of Russian classical and contemporary art, MacDougall's Fine Art Auctions, London, England. Since 2017, he has been cooperating with the Art Collecting. His works are in private and corporate collections in Russia, USA, Great Britain, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, and Israel. As a designer, illustrator and photographer, he worked with such publishers and magazines as Rider's Digest, Beauty, Anturazh, Vagrius, Tri Kvadrata and many others.
To date, he has painted three large polyptyches in painting, among others: the Russian Cycle, Pictures at an Exhibition and Seven Words.
The Russian Cycle, today, consists of twenty-five canvases. In this work, the artist rethinks famous symbols, folk cliches and images from Russian reality and history: In the Open, Sunrise with the Yoke, Man on the Podium and Snow, Metaphor of Impassability, Tsarevich Dmitry and False, Galife.Dome, Simeon Bekbulatovich, Matryoshka in the Depths and others.
Pictures at an Exhibition - sixteen canvases in a number equal to the number of parts of Modest Mussorgsky's piano cycle of the same name. The composer wrote this work under the impression of the posthumous exhibition of the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann. His drawings, watercolors and sketches are isolated works that are not connected by a single storyline. Mussorgsky created a full-fledged work with a recurring Promenade theme and intermissive earthly and fantastic images. The artist creates the entire missing series of the Pictures and through Hartmann's drawings and Mussorgsky's music completes a kind of semantic and visual symmetry.
Seven Words is a polyptych of seven canvases dedicated to the Passion of Christ, where each painting depicts one of the seven last Words of the Savior, spoken by Him on the cross.
In graphic technique, among other things, he made the series Valamo and A Part of the Speech.
Valamo is a work connected with the history of the Valaam island, where the artist lived for some time in his youth. Monastic routine before the ruin in the 40s, and new realities of the territory of the former monastery after a nursing home was created there, where unwanted cripples from big cities were taken to after the war. The artist turns to the theme of the collision of two worlds that do not touch, but by a twist of fate found to be in the same landscape and within the same walls.
A Part of the Speech is a series of illustrations, and it would be more accurate to say the pictorial equivalent of Joseph Brodsky's poetic cycle of the same name.
In the field of photography and multi-media, two main lines have formed. This is a multisyllabic shooting of slide films adapted from images built into a kind of visual scenario, where they are shown on the screen in development, where the interaction of a human with an object, connected in their metaphysical plane (The Birth of Photography, The Passion on the Phone, Tea Ceremony, The Place Where She May be Alone, Meta-Auto, Ode on Birth), and the other, the one that is usually called candid shooting. But in this case it is not just a fixation of an event or single shots, but a chance to see with the help of a camera wonderful moments of human existence, situations on the streets, changes in details and faces, color and light nuances, unexpected angles, where all this is also shown in the development and movement of the pictorial narrative, where one shot turns into the other one. (Moscow-Endless Journey, Kremlin-In Aenigmate, Petersburg. Great Prospect. Winter, Tram, Koktebel. Off-Season, Stuttgart. Gesamtbetrag, Venezia. Sommario del Mondo, Paris, Munich, Strasbourg and other series). The artist's slide films have been repeatedly shown to various audiences.
In 2008 - 2010, he lived and worked in Germany, where he had painted a number of paintings, made a large-format series of 20 German Drawings, and shot a slide film Mein Schloss, inspired by the plot of Franz Kafka's novel The Castle.
During these years, he repeatedly changed the manner of painting, pictorial and compositional structure, style-forming foundations, emphasizing the diversity of approaches. The artist himself says:
I have always remained within the framework of the image as such, insisting on the individuality of each painting, without wishing to turn what I do into a series of stylistically similar paintings, which often happens in contemporary art. And despite my love for modernism, and in particular for the luminaries of abstract art, i think, based on subsequent history, that abstraction is a place where you need to take round-trip tickets to. Let alone the idea of textuality or excessive, from my point of view, theorizing in the form of all kinds of concepts. That's what visual art is for - its concepts should be painted on canvases, and only after that in the form of explanations on paper, and not vice versa. The main thing that happened in painting for me, first intuitively, but then quite definitely, is building a bridge between the achievements of the Russian avant-garde and figurative painting, i.e. in other words, my task is to create an image where the abstract principle is in natural balance with the objective one. I feel my responsibility to not go beyond the boundaries defined by the space of the painting, but stay within them, because if there is a power in visual art, it is the power of the image itself.
