Denis Ichitovkin

Born in 1977 in Perm, Denis Ichitovkin graduated from the Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (mural painting class of Andrey Mylnikov). The artist currently lives and works in St. Petersburg.

Ichitovkin’s conservative academic background, coupled with his own artistic affinities, informed his distinct creative manner smoothly blending austere, nearly photographic realism with a contemporary outlook on the subject of painting and narrative principles. The painter depicts the interior views of typical city apartments that play host to unremarkable events: someone is having a conversation in the kitchen, someone else is sewing, and yet another person dozes off on the chair. At the heart of Denis Ichitovkin’s artworks is not someone’s presence but absence: it is the emptiness and understatement that make his paintings so mesmerising.