Sanya Kantarovsky

Sanya Kantarovsky’s practice incorporates sculpture, animation and installations, while painting remains at the center. Teeming with wry humor and unearthly narratives, his paintings propose scenarios of turmoil and investigate liminal spaces, physical proximities, affect, and cruelty. The often delicate and macabre subjects grapple with the confines of their bodies, interacting with one another in a painterly satire of status anxiety and existential crises. Engaging the historical canon of painting and literature, Kantarovsky perverts tropes and archetypes with elements taken from more populist forms of visual culture such as cartoons, illustration, film and advertising.

His works are held in collections around the world, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm; Pinault Collection, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.