KANTAROVSKY, Sanya
Sanya Kantarovsky: Selected Works 2010-2024

“My interest in the human subject has less to do with the politics of representation than with the kind of identification, or over-identification, that some figurative paintings are able to activate. In that sense, the kind of relationship that a viewer has to a subject is not dissimilar from the values of theater and performance. I find that the closeness and intimacy with which we look at faces and bodies in paintings is rather singular. I am interested in the erotics of that type of connection to a painted subject.”
— SK

Forlorn and spiritually bankrupt, tender or abject—the subjects in the figurative paintings of Sanya Kantarovsky convey an uneasy, dark humor. They seem trapped in a precarious inner monologue, or under the spell of mundane lived experience. Sanya Kantarovsky: Selected Works 2010-2024 spans the artist's oeuvre through more than 140 image plates, a conversation between Kantarovsky and art historian Isabelle Graw, as well as essays by the psychoanalyst and writer Jamieson Webster : ) and art historian George Baker.

Published by MIT Press / Aspen Art Museum, 2024
Design by John Morgan studio
Monographs / Painting