Nikolai Ishchuk

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

My practice uses the processes and materials of photography as a departure point for wide-ranging investigations that assimilate painting, drawing, sculpture and architecture. To this end, I often employ visually reductive but materially additive strategies that explore the affective potential of formal devices. Resulting perceptual propositions test the thresholds of fixed media definitions, legibility and non-objective meaning. In the last few years, the practice has seen a gradual shift from using the photographic print as a site for material interventions and mark-making activities toward broader concerns with surface registration and what can be called ‘demarcation’ – the line as an architectonic compositional device as well as a boundary of material identity and between 2D and 3D space. And more recently still, a more modular compositional language has been emerging. Hovering between the handmade, the industrial, the elemental, the architectural and the archaeological, my practice also explores how these formal generates affect – or an illusion thereof – and taps into photography's ambivalent relationship with the modernist canon, to which it was instrumental but into which it wasn't properly absorbed. My work aligns with the concept of “contemporary ruin gaze” posited by Svetlana Boym, which is a gaze "reconciled to perspectivism, to conjectural history and spatial discontinuity [and that] requires an acceptance of disharmony, of the contrapunctual relationship of...

Artwork