Contemplating the ocean Print

Alex Gordenkov was born in Kostroma, a city in central Russia, initially receiving his art training at his local Fine Art School. He moved to Moscow to expand his artistic experience of, and exposure to, more current trends and avant guarde. But in 2013 he discovered Madeira, the island of perpetual Spring which invoked an intense personal response, and has remained there working and living ever since. His work using oil, acrylic and watercolours is inspired by the beauty of nature and the human body but is also informed by images of mythological creatures. This later source has impacted on his current attentions which focus on sculptural artworks, creations imaging contemporary mythological characters, involving modern urbane storylines of fairy tales. Needing a flexible material giving him the opportunity to express beauty and plasticity of human form whilst encompassing emotionality and expressiveness of complex features and pose, he turned to the use of stoneware, recognizing its innate strengths and abilities to sustain and yet yield to his aesthetic demands. The use and application of underglaze paints accents and anthropomorphizes these fictional characters at the same time allowing artistic completeness. In this manner he is transcending through use of traditional techniques his cultural inheritance to produce attenuated figures of striking modernity which still retain the allure of aspects of childhood in their whimsy, but are fully flavoured with adult narrative, peppered with art-historical references. His works are in private collections in France, Finland, Russia, UK and the USA.