Sanya Kantarovsky

Sanya Kantarovsky works across mediums, including sculpture, animation and curation, with painting remaining at the center of his practice. Teeming with wry humor and unearthly narratives, Kantarovsky’s paintings propose scenarios of turmoil and investigate liminal spaces, physical proximities, affect, and cruelty. His sometimes delicate and often macabre subjects grapple with the confines of their bodies, interacting with one another in a painterly satire of status anxiety and existential crises. Willfully engaging the historical canon of painting and literature, Kantarovsky perverts tropes and archetypes with elements gleaned from more populist forms of visual culture such as cartoons, illustration, film and advertising. Kantarovsky’s paintings a reassembled through fits and starts, with layered abrasions and dispersions of material, resulting in surfaces that engender a  productive delay in looking and seeing.