Aleksandr Vinogradov

Aleksandr Vinogradov was born on 30 December 1963 in Moscow. His first encounter with art happened in Rostov, where at twelve he discovered the pull of drawing — the starting point of everything that followed. His earliest attempts were copies of images from Cuban postage stamps, a foundational exercise for the painter he was to become.

He graduated from the Moscow Art School in Memory of 1905 in 1984 and from the Surikov Moscow State Academic Art Institute in 1995. Since 1994 he has been a member of the Moscow Union of Artists and a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts.

At the institute he met Vladimir Dubossarsky, and in 1994 the two formed the duo “Vinduby” (Vinogradov and Dubossarsky), which lasted until 2014 and came to stand for a new epoch in Russian art. Their fusion of Soviet realism and pop art produced monumental canvases in which elements of popular culture merge with Russian landscapes, rural and urban alike. The partnership brought international recognition, with exhibitions from London to New York and a notable appearance at the Venice Biennale in 2003. One of their most prominent projects, “The Four Seasons of Russian Painting,” was shown at the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val in 2007 and earned the pair a place on the Kandinsky Prize shortlist that year in the Project of the Year category.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s the duo's work reached well beyond the gallery: it appeared on the cover of a seminal album by the New York band Talking Heads and found its way into literature through the books of the Russian writer Viktor Pelevin. Their presence extended to the major international art fairs.

In 2014, after two decades of working together, Vinogradov and Dubossarsky went their separate ways. Aleksandr Vinogradov moved to Milan, where he turned to digital painting and held a number of solo exhibitions. His first individual project, “The Space-Time Continuum,” was shown at the Triumph Gallery in Moscow in 2016. Other solo works followed, among them a uniquely painted trolleybus. His current direction moves away from computer design and back towards the classical substance of painting.

Vinogradov's works are held by the State Tretyakov Gallery and the contemporary art collection of the Tsaritsyno State Museum-Reserve in Moscow, the State Russian Museum and the Novy Museum in Saint Petersburg, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.