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Cupid (2023)

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Cupid (2023)
Cupid (2023)
About the artist
Oleksandr Balbyshev
Oleksandr Balbyshev
Oleksandr Balbyshev is a contemporary Ukrainian artist who works primarily in oil paint on canvas and experiments with found objects. Oleksandr's art has two very different main directions, each representing the essential side of his identity. First...
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I like to look at a beautiful male body. Therefore, I am sad that there are so little masculine sensuality and beauty in the art world. About 30 years ago, a group of feminist artists, Guerrilla Girls, decided to determine the ratio of male and female nudes presented on canvases exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It turned out that male nudes are only 15%. And it seems that today the situation has not changed much. On online galleries where I sell my art, male nudes are about 20%. While the female nude is generally regarded as a staple on the finest of museum walls, the male nude has managed to maintain an air of illicitness up until the present day, continuing to trouble people in different ways. This phenomenon's root cause is because art history was a “white straight men only” club for a long time. Its creators have used mechanisms of suppression of rights and marginalization of minorities. And the culture of the dominant patriarchal and heterosexual discourses is still influential. I would like to see our culture represent naked men as frequently as we do naked women to remove the shock value of the nude male. And this is my goal as an artist. I use the male nude to express erotic feelings in the same way that the female nude has been used. I am trying to explore the slippage of masculinity and redefine what it means to be male.
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About the artist
Page cover
Oleksandr Balbyshev

Oleksandr Balbyshev

Ukraine
Oleksandr Balbyshev is a contemporary Ukrainian artist who works primarily in oil paint on canvas and experiments with found objects. Oleksandr's art has two very different main directions, each representing the essential side of his identity. Firstly, Oleksandr, as open gay, using art practices, tries to understand the nature of male identity and the stigma of the male nude, explore the slippage of masculinity, and redefine what it means to be male. Oleksandr makes vivid oil paintings, like protest posters, with many quotes from art history. His works don't hide their homoeroticism and challenge the prevailing outdated morality that rejects male nudity. Secondly, as a Ukrainian, Oleksandr reinterprets iconic symbols of the USSR, the terrorist empire that occupied his motherland for seven decades. The artist tries to overcome the traumatic historical experience of his country by transforming the sinister shards of the USSR, including old portraits of Lenin and other Soviet leaders, into something funny and not scary. Oleksandr ultimately achieves an artistic aesthetic marked by powerful pops of color, mystical surrealist elements, kitsch decorative qualities, and absurd aspects reminiscent of Dadaism.
Cupid (2023)
Amor (2023)
Nude in the Grand Canyon (2023)
Bunny Boy (2023)
Eros (2023)
Black & White torso (2016)
Heat (2017)
Sunset (2023)
Blue Beach (2017)
Minotaur (2023)
Eros (2023)
Red Guy (2019)