ARTISTS

Syugir Buluktayev was born in 1994 in Elista, Kalmykia. He works across painting, drawing, and sculpture. He studied Design at the University of Liberec in the Czech Republic (2011–2016). In 2017, he presented a solo exhibition at the National Museum of the Republic of Kalmykia. His works are held in private collections in Russia.

The core imagery of Sugir’s practice is built around horses and tulips, symbols deeply connected to Kalmykia, the artist’s homeland. These motifs emerged organically in 2018, during a prolonged period of living in Europe, as a visual return to familiar cultural roots.
In Kalmyk nomadic culture, the horse holds a central symbolic role. In the epic traditions of Mongolic and Turkic peoples, the genre of “magtal to the horse” celebrates the horse as a powerful, almost mythical being endowed with extraordinary qualities. Sugir’s work can be understood as a contemporary visual continuation of this tradition.

His horses are not realistic; they are poetic and mythical embodiments of energy, movement, and light. Always depicted in motion—running, leaping, flying—they exist in a state of dynamic harmony. Textural surfaces of clouds, flowers, and abstract ornament reference traditional decorative arts and national textiles, while the vivid palette evokes the blooming steppe.

The tulip, a longstanding national symbol of Kalmykia alongside the horse, represents purity, loyalty, and friendship—core values that lie at the heart of Sugir’s artistic universe.

Slim Safont (Berga, Barcelona, 1995) is a visual artist and muralist with a Fine Arts degree from the University of Barcelona. He began exploring urban art and painting instinctively from the age of 12.
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His work is defined by constant pictorial research, developing a personal and critical view of social issues through figurative and realistic language and a meticulous study of color. Specializing in public space interventions, his murals explore narratives of everyday life, portraying communities through the human figure, portraiture, and landscape. Influenced by photography and chromatic analysis, he creates evocative, high-impact visual atmospheres.
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Alongside his urban practice, he has taken part in numerous international exhibitions in galleries and alternative art spaces.

Gleb Baranov explores the complex intersections of intimacy, desire, and perception in the digital age. His practice engages with found imagery from anime, art history, and online archives—images already shaped by repetition, fantasy, and distance—and transforms them through painting, drawing, and graphic processes. By introducing slow, manual gestures into these circulating visual systems, Baranov’s hand becomes a corrective force, creating delay, friction, and vulnerability in images designed for seamless consumption. His work is particularly concerned with moments when immersion fails — when digitally mediated figures escape the screen to occupy material space, destabilizing the viewer’s gaze and generating new relationships between image, body, and audience.

In his ongoing project Monet-Anime (2025–present), Baranov examines the collision of two seemingly incompatible systems of seeing: the perceptual, vibrating atmospheres of Impressionism and the hyper-stylized, emotionally coded logic of anime. While Monet’s landscapes depend on embodied observation, anime characters function as pre-formed vessels of identification shaped by digital media. By placing these systems into shared pictorial spaces, Baranov tests how contemporary subjectivity negotiates between sensory experience and mediated projection. The figures do not inhabit the landscape but confront it, standing at the threshold where physical perception meets the clarity of digital desire.

Rather than framing “high” and “low” culture as opposed, Baranov proposes a hybrid visual model: one in which immersion in media images refracts rather than erases material perception. His paintings operate as experiments in reconstruction, assembling feeling through fragments of cultural memory. In doing so, he demonstrates how styles often dismissed as escapist—like anime—can be reconsidered as tools for exploring contemporary subjectivity, intimacy, and the subtle interplay between the digital and the material.

Roxy Peroxyde (born Roxanne Sauriol Hauenherm in 1987, Montreal) is a self‑taught Canadian painter whose striking, photorealistic oil portraits have earned her international recognition in galleries and museums across North America and beyond. Known for her vivid contemporary reinterpretations of classical imagery and her fearless celebration of female identity, Roxy’s work blends technical mastery with sharp wit, vibrant color, and layered social commentary. Her female figures—often staged with photographic precision before being translated to canvas—serve as powerful vessels for autobiographical and cultural narratives that explore identity, resilience, desire, and collective experience.

Rather than simply echoing art history, Roxy reinvents it: she reimagines iconic compositions from the past with a bold, modern edge that speaks to both continuity and change in society. Her pieces place contemporary women in dialogue with the visual traditions of the masters, juxtaposing neon palettes, unexpected symbolism, and irreverent attitude to provoke new perspectives on gender, power, and perception. This approach creates a tension between surface beauty and deeper intellectual charge, inviting viewers to grapple with both pleasure and discomfort in equal measure.

Roxy Peroxyde’s recent exhibitions—such as Animus at Arch Enemy Arts (2025) and The Current Things at S16 Gallery (2023)—showcase her ongoing exploration of personal truth and collective consciousness through portraiture. Her work has been featured alongside leading contemporary artists in major group shows and museum presentations, and remains characterized by its bold vision, unapologetic voice, and commitment to storytelling rooted in lived experience.

Celio Koko is a Belgian–Lebanese contemporary artist known for his expressive, emotionally charged works that balance between abstraction and figuration. Born in Belgium, he spent a significant part of his early life in Africa, including Uganda, Tanzania, and Congo. These formative years had a lasting impact on his artistic vision, shaping his fascination with raw nature, animal imagery, tribal cultures, and instinctive forms of expression.

Koko’s path to art was unconventional. After a life-changing personal experience in his late twenties, he fully committed himself to artistic practice, using painting as a tool for self-discovery and emotional release. His works are driven by intuition rather than strict conceptual frameworks, allowing spontaneity, gesture, and energy to play a central role in the creative process.

Characterized by bold colors, powerful brushstrokes, and layered textures, Koko’s visual language reflects influences of neo-expressionism while remaining deeply personal. He works across various media, producing paintings and sculptural works that evoke movement, intensity, and psychological depth.

Celio Koko has exhibited internationally, and his works are part of numerous private collections around the world. Through his practice, he continues to explore the boundaries between the conscious and the instinctive, creating artworks that resonate on both a visceral and emotional level.

DARIA PASECHNIK (b. 1997) is a contemporary artist living and working in Moscow. In her artistic practice, Daria Pasechnik draws on personal memory, childhood recollections, and sensory experience, as well as affective states and images emerging from everyday life and the contemporary visual environment, which linger as impressions and sensations.

Daria is particularly interested in moments when familiar space loses its stability and ordinary objects begin to appear animated, revealing signs of an inner life and subjectivity, resonating with ideas of panpsychism.

Working with airbrush painting, she creates images in which objects — such as shoes, textiles, and soft forms — shed their utilitarian function and become carriers of memory and psychological states. They exist as presences capable of emotional interaction, uncovering the latent sensitivity of the material world.

Pollyanna is a visual artist and illustrator based in Manila, Philippines, and a graduate of the University of the Philippines’ College of Fine Arts, where she earned a degree in Visual Communication.

Her art explores themes of serenity, innocence, and imagination through characters that embody childlike curiosity and emotional depth. Drawing from the complexities of life and inner growth, Pollyanna creates narratives that invite viewers to reconnect with joy, playfulness, and hope.

At the heart of her artistic universe is Polly — a symbolic muse inspired by the hydrangea flower. Representing resilience and positivity, Polly blooms through darkness and rain, her ever-changing petals reflecting the transient nature of emotions and life itself. Set within a soft, dreamlike world, Polly and her companions become metaphors for friendship, healing, and emotional support.

Through her work, Pollyanna celebrates the child within, the beauty of small wonders, and the quiet power of lightness carried into adulthood.

Sasha Braulov (b. 1987, Leningrad, USSR) is a Saint Petersburg–based artist and product designer working primarily with hand embroidery and textile-based practices. He graduated from Saint Petersburg State University in 2009 and co-founded the product design studio 52 FACTORY in 2014.

His artistic practice focuses on embroidery as a contemporary medium, using it to document architecture, cultural memory, and everyday narratives. He is best known for the long-term series Architecture of the Avant-Garde, comprising over 450 embroidered works depicting unrealised projects, lost monuments, and surviving examples of 1920s–1930s avant-garde architecture.

In parallel, he develops the series Documentary Embroidery, in which childhood memories, cinema, and music are translated into embroidered scenes that merge imagination with everyday life. He also works with embroidered street art, placing small narrative images with encouraging phrases in urban space.

His works are held in the collections of the Russian Museum and the All-Russian Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art, and have been exhibited internationally, including at the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, Gallery on Shabolovka, and the Museum of Architecture in Almaty.

Pablo Dona is an Argentinian artist, currently living and working in Miami, USA. The artist’s practice is rooted in the idea of childhood as a state of purity, clarity, and emotional truth. Childhood is seen not merely as a phase of life, but as an original point of connection with oneself — a time when emotions are honest, love is unconditional, and imagination knows no limits.

By transforming ordinary objects into poetic, surreal scenes, the artist builds a bridge to childhood, inviting viewers to reconnect with simple emotions and rediscover the magic hidden in everyday life. In this world, imagination reigns: sharks swim in teacups, boats sail through alphabet soup, and polar bears inhabit marshmallow landscapes — reminding us that the child within us is never truly lost.

VLADA TARASOVA is a contemporary artist from Yeysk, Russia. In her
practice, she explores the nature of images and digital visuals produced
by contemporary media, as well as the relationship between these
images and the reality in which we live. She is interested in how images
exist on the internet, how they are formed and embedded into the
world, and how they subsequently influence it. She examines the ways
we engage with media-transmitted narratives and questions what these
narratives attempt to tell us.

She approaches the internet as an alphabet of ready-made images,
transforming found visuals to emphasize the specific conditions of their
existence in a digital environment and to reveal the inevitable rupture
that occurs when they detach from physical reality. She seeks to
demonstrate how the content we consume regulates our attention and
shapes our aesthetic coordinates, compelling us to structure and
perceive life according to predefined narratives. Her work aims to
expose the image’s potential to generate desire, suggesting that
anything can become part of a consumer system.

Painting serves as her primary medium. She often employs chromatic
aberration and heightened saturation to underscore the material and
temporal qualities of the depicted image. Through the prolonged and
labor-intensive process of creating each work, an accumulation of
intensity emerges within the image itself, reflecting the intensity of the
scenarios and desires offered to us by contemporary media