Aleksey Dubinsky

Aleksey Dubinsky, painter and graphic artist, calls his method “everyday surrealism”. He produces figurative art, with his main subjects being portrait and still life; in depicting people and everyday objects like houseplants and dishes, the artist tries to see them as if for the first time.

Aleksey Dubinsky

Until recently, his work was largely apolitical — he gravitated toward traditional motifs, like flowers or antiquity, and the main themes of his paintings and drawings were questions of a purely graphic nature, like explorations of non-standard relationships between point and line. The artist has developed a recognizable style, using graphic techniques in painting, and combining thin lines and silhouettes with bold, bright color fills.

Dubinsky responded to the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine with an animation depicting burning houses. Since then, he has continued to take up new subjects from time to time — like terror and civil resistance — while treating them in his characteristic style.

Aleksey Dubinsky was born in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in 1985. In 2011, he graduated from the Ilya Glazunov Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, where he majored in historical and religious painting. He won the Martini Art Weekend prize upon graduation, which allowed him to further his arts education at Central Saint Martins in London. From 2014 to 2017, Dubinsky was part of a team that decorated the window displays at TsUM, a famous Moscow department store. His first solo exhibition took place in 2018 at the Moscow gallery Triumph. His work has been shown at MMOMA (the Moscow Museum of Modern Art) and sold on Moscow’s main art markets, Cosmoscow and Blazar. Today, the artist lives and works in Tbilisi.