Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art presented an exhibition by Ivan Pokidyshev whose artworks fuse warmth and light into visions of love, hope, inner strength, and vulnerability
Ivan Pokidyshev’s paintings deal with the two phenomena essential for the artist – namely, light and warmth. These attributes of life and hope carry a universal meaning in every system of values and symbols.
Pokidyshev’s artistic practice is based on thermography, a process used for creating images of infrared radiation captured with a thermal camera. Infrared radiation is emitted by all objects with a temperature above absolute zero. The warmer the object, the more vivid and bright its radiation, causing its thermal image to appear incandescent.
The warm glow we see in thermograms represents human warmth and vital energy, whether flowing from one figure to another and splashing all around, or, contrariwise, fading away amid the cold emptiness.
Ivan Pokidyshev’s characters are young and beautiful. Their overwhelming vitality manifests itself in inner light and warmth. This life-affirming energy, along with the existential motif of roaming in the darkness of obscurity and imminent death, are the recurring themes of this exhibition.
Ivan Pokidyshev was born in 1993 in St. Petersburg. Having graduated from the Ilya Repin St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 2017, he has been lecturing there since 2018. In 2019, Artmuza Contemporary Art Museum hosted his solo show Shadow and Light. Since then, Pokidyshev’s works were featured in a variety of group and theme-specific exhibitions, including Light and Warmth at One’s Mind Gallery (2021, St. Petersburg), Unique Inflection at the Museum and Exhibition Complex of the Russian Academy of Arts (2022, Moscow), ARTLIFE FEST at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall (2023, Moscow), Snob magazine’s ArtAct project (2024, Moscow), and the 2025 Erarta Prize, among others. The artist’s creative practice extends beyond the traditional museum and gallery space, unlocking the full potential of contemporary art in urban environments: in 2023, Ivan designed stained glass panels for the interiors of SKA Arena and for the façade of the Judicial Department at the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation in St. Petersburg.
