Ivan Lubennikov

Ivan Leonidovich Lubennikov is a Russian painter, born in 1951 in Minsk. He lives and works in Moscow.

He spends his childhood in Siberia whose memory, especially hunting and fishing, spreads through his pictorial and literary artworks. He moves to Moscow at 14 years old and enters a few years later the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow in the monumental art department.

Graduated in 1976, he mainly dedicates himself to the realization of big mural fresco until the beginning of the 1990s. He first stands out in 1982 with a mural painting for the public room of the Tryokhgorka manufacture, awarded with the prize of the Union of the Artists of Moscow, first of his numerous monumental artworks: decoration of the façade and interior of the new train station of Zvenigorod (first prize of the Foundation of the Artists of Moscow), memorial monument for the Russian section of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum with the architect Alexandr Skolan in 1985, intervention with laminated iron on the old facades of the Taganka Theatre in Moscow in 1987. Most of his realizations have been destroyed during the last years of the Soviet regime, on the contrary of one of his emblematic artwork: the design of the State Museum Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1991.

Ivan Lubennikov begins to show his paintings in the first years of the 1980s but it is first important solo exhibition in a Muscovite gallery in 1987 which brings him recognition. The majority of these exhibited paintings are now part of Russian regional museums’ collections. The end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s correspond to the peak of interest from foreign collectors in Russian art; during this period his paintings were acquired by great German collectors, such as Henri Nannen or Peter Ludwig who now owns around twenty of his artworks.

The economic problems of the New Russia put a stop to his architectural works. From the early 1990s, it is a 15-year period entirely devoted to painting and characterized by the use of black background. Profoundly Russian, his painting switches between ironic detachment and hedonism, popular culture and artistic references. He recognizes the influence of Paul Delvaux and has many times declared his admiration for Matisse, Caravaggio, Zurbarán and the art of icons in their way of constructing space. With a high sense of composition and an approach intentionally aestheticized, Lubennikov continually reinvents his main subjects: nudes, still lifes, Siberian landscapes.

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