Konstantin Khudyakov

Born in 1945 in Tsaryovshchina, Saratov Oblast, Konstantin graduated from the Industrial Architecture Department of the Moscow Architectural Institute. In 1988, jointly with a group of like-minded artists, he founded the first independent contemporary art institution in the Soviet Union – the M’ARS Center of Contemporary Art, and acted as its Board Chairman until his death in June 2026.

Before 1997, Konstantin Khudyakov worked in the traditional medium of oil on canvas painting, later transitioning to digital media which he viewed as the most adequate means to express his artistic vision. Importantly, in Khudyakov’s oeuvre, digital photography and image editing were only a part of a more complex system dominated by the visual, emotional, semantic, and social content. Essentially a visionary artist, he anticipated the advent of digital totalitarianism and the enslavement of reality by the glossy aesthetics propagated by the ubiquitous gadgets and oversized advertising structures flooding the urban realm.

Konstantin Khudyakov passed away on 27 June 2026.