Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko is born in 1998 at Kharkiv in Ukraine. He is living and working in Milan, Italy. He works in a variety of media, but the basis of his practice is easel painting and drawing, which are occasionally accompanied by installations and readymades.. Strelyaev-Nazarko graduated from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, where he concurrently studied design and academic painting. The artist then went to Milan to study Visual Arts and Curatorial studies at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, from which he graduated as a Master of Arts.
Studying in Kharkiv, Strelyaev-Nazarko began to participate in exhibitions in his native city as well as in Kyiv, gradually discovering the main themes of his work: nostalgia, history, the past and how it is reinterpreted by us today and affects our lives. After moving to Italy, the artist began to change his approach to painting by relating the language of old European art to the contemporary reality, both universal and post-Soviet. Here, during the covid, he begins to work with the topic of the false memory, using his personal family archive in his works. During his thesis research, Strelyaev-Nazarko created a series of paintings about radical football fans, which touches on the issue of revanchism and extremism.
After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the artist began work on Watergames, a project of small oil paintings exploring the fate of the central square in his hometown of Kharkiv, which had suffered from shelling. The project was part of the festival Curated By 2022 and the exhibition Extraneous (curated by Zasha Colah and Valentina Viviani) in Vienna at the EXILE gallery. The painting “The View” from this exhibition was included in ARTFORUM magazine’s annual review (dec 2022).
At the moment Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko is working on a new project called «Paramnesia» which is a series of still lifes and figure paintings based on illustrations from his grandmother’s Soviet cookery book, old toys and TV shows from 90s and 00s. Here he explores the “lags” of our memory, how the fantastic can replace or blend in with real facts, how family, society and propaganda influence our perception of history and how myth-making takes place.
At the moment Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko is working on a new project called «Paramnesia» which is a series of still lifes and figure paintings based on illustrations from his grandmother’s Soviet cookery book, old toys and TV shows from 90s and 00s. Here he explores the “lags” of our memory, how the fantastic can replace or blend in with real facts, how family, society and propaganda influence our perception of history and how myth-making takes place.
Exhibitions
- Group Exhibition, HudpromLoft, Kharkiv, Ukraine (2017)
- «Paintings», AMD Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine. Solo Exhibition (2018)
- «How important it is to be serious», Municipal Gallery, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Group Exhibition (2019)
- «June», Vovatanya Gallery, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Group Exhibition (2019)
- «Free Wall Space», online exhibition (www. freewall.space) (2020)
- Artribune. Blackout Book #1. La mostra di NABA su Artribune (05.05.2021)
- «Extraneous», EXILE, Vienna, Austria.
- Curated by Zasha Colah and Valentina Viviani for Cureted By (2022)
Publications
- Artribune. Blackout Book #1. La mostra di NABA su Artribune. Author Giulia Profeti (05.05.2021)
- Echo Gone Wrong. The True Story of Kelet: Curated By 2022. Author Àngels Miralda (12.10.2022)
- Artforum DECEMBER 2022, VOL. 61, NO. 4. THE YEAR IN REVIEW. Kate Sutton on “Extraneous” (01.12.2022)
