Sanya Kantarovsky’s Paintings Begin With “Making Strange” — and a Wide Circle of Influences
A new podcast conversation with Sanya Kantarovsky opens a window onto the painter’s visual world, where art history, literature, film, and music all press into the same frame. In the episode, hosted by Ben Luke and produced by David Clack and Aimee Dawson, the Moscow-born artist discusses the experiences and references that have shaped his work, from childhood access to the Pushkin Museum to the figures he returns to now.
Kantarovsky was born in Moscow in 1982 and moved to New York City when he was ten. He still lives and works there. His paintings are often figurative at first glance, but they resist easy reading: bodies seem to mutate, animals and people overlap, and landscapes carry a charged atmosphere that can feel ominous, comic, or both at once. He describes that approach through ostranenija, the Russian term for “making strange,” which offers a useful key to the slow, unsettled way his images reveal themselves.
One of the most formative experiences he cites is seeing Picasso’s “Girl on Ball” (1905) at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. From there, the conversation moves across a broad field of influence: Francisco de Goya, Giorgio de Chirico, Philip Guston, Trisha Donnelly, and Charline von Heyl on the visual side; Anna Akhmatova, Tatsumi Hijikata, and Andrei Tarkovksy among the artists and thinkers from other disciplines who have left a mark on his imagination.
The podcast also touches on Kantarovsky’s studio life and the larger question that anchors the series: what art is for. That question feels especially apt for an artist whose paintings do not settle for illustration or narrative, but instead create a space of ambiguity, tension, and close looking.
A related exhibition, “Sanya Kantarovsky: Basic Failure,” is on view at Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Palazzo Loredan, Venice, from 6 May to 22 November.
