My paintings depict imaginary spaces that intertwine autobiographical elements with references to history and mythology, as a way of exploring the themes of time, memory and displacement.
Born in the former USSR, I left the country at the age of nine, and have lived in four other countries since. While unavoidably leading to a degree of confusion about my personal identity, this somewhat unusual background has also given me the license to create a fictionalized biography, a pseudo-historical world, which I can nevertheless claim as a part of my own heritage. The imagery in my works is therefore drawn from a wide variety of sources, ranging from my personal history to mythology and fairy tales; these diverse references combine to form anachronistic environments that are a mixture of fact and fiction – in a sense, they are invented memories.