Denis Tretyakov

The wild, bestial, bordering on surreal world of Denis Tretyakov, Saint Petersburg, Russia-based animalier sculptor, is an invitation to one of the most heated intellectual disputes of all, the Human-Animal debate.
While natural science has handed us a solid knowledge of humans being animals, we find it very hard to act from a place of science every time we holler,”Stop acting like animals!” or, “We’re humans, not animals!”.Tretyakov’s art argues that these automatic thoughts cannot be overrode by science, because for ages now we have spoken about the subject not in the language of science, but in tongues of philosophy and art.
That’s where Denis Tretyakov comes in. Having mastered the language and the expressive potential of sculpture as a Russian Academy of Arts graduate, he is able to join this eternal debate on its own terms.
Tretyakov’s images make it intuitively clear that there exists no difference between human and animal nature. Both are equal in beauty and in the richness of their emotional spectrum. The artist’s finely honed craft of an animalier renders this equality visible. Tretyakov states that humanity throughout its cultural history had heavily invested in animal images, perhaps even more than in its own, and on...

2009, Roerich Art School
2015, The Russian Academy of Arts (Repin St. Petersburg State University of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture)