
Gallery current exhibition
Vladimir Radujkov
5 February | 23 April 2022
PIN CUSHIONS
“It’s a very close and difficult thing to know why
some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system
and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.”
(Francis Bacon, excerpt from an interview with David Sylvester
for the Sunday Time Magazine, 14 July1963)
With a soft, stuffed belly and a spine full of metal needles, pin cushions are a good example of dichotomy. As a household item often associated with the labour of mothers and grandmothers, its inherent deceiving tenderness is a quality hardly matched by any other object explored during childhood.
Being a child and carried off by instinct and eagerness, it is very common that when the opportunity comes to seize the pin cushion and squeeze it in with the fingers, it becomes a moment of instant regret: long-lost needles quickly emerge through the soft fabric to poke the skin with their sharp tooth. Not deep enough to cause terrible pain all at once, but surely prickly enough to associate this distressing sensation to the glory of feeling the stuffing fold under the slow pressure.
This sort of pleasurable contradiction is the distinguishing quality that makes Vladimir’s paintings so deeply interesting and alluring. The elemental shapes that are the subjects of his creations drift organically within the canvas, resembling the array that metal needles take when arranging themselves in an orderly manner along the lines of a magnetic field. They are dictated by the nature of the creator to follow a specific form and structure.
The hues of the palette that Vladimir employs and the silent charming ache that the paintings emanate, may also remind of the specific taste of work of Francis Bacon. The skilful ability to turn pinks, magentas and yellows into screaming colours, going directly opposite their daily connotations, by flinging them against a dark and ominous background is something worthy of remark. So is the talent of conveying to the viewer what Bacon used to call a direct expression of the nervous system and everything that affected it, both physically and emotionally, a “deeply ordered chaos” that is crucial to every and each artwork.
In the same way, Vladimir’s figures generate a very unique microcosm around them, drawing the viewer in, right at the centre of their colourful and unyielding thorny nest. The emotional trance that the paintings evoke is to be experienced wholly and without restraint: that is their ultimate purpose, to deliver the sharpest of feelings right into the softest spot of the mind.
Coming Shows


Cologne, April 2022
May 2022
GROUP SHOW
Jake Kelly
Natalia Grezina
Vladimir Radujkov
SOLO SHOW
Jake Kelly
Chrysalid Gallery
Chrysalid is a dynamic cocoon aiming at transforming the canons around contemporary art and its market. It’s a conceptual and experimental gallery based in Rotterdam (the Netherlands) that actively promotes and collaborates with young and daring artists from all over Europe. As a communal platform, Chrysalid wants to give the artists room to experiment, to grow in their vision and to fearlessly portrait reality through the insight of their unique practices. In this metamorphic framework, the individuals behind the idea of the gallery collaborate to reshape and broaden the narratives in contemporary art, making them more inclusive and representative of the multitude of details that existence is made of. Chrysalid is not a showbox. Chrysalid is a pulsating core of transformative energy.
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Gallery Team

Alexey Shifman
Gallery director
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Tatiana Shifman
Gallery social media moderator

Marth von Loeben
Gallery art curator

Anton Ermolov
Gallery identity manager
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