Andrey Remnev

Contemporary painter Andrey Remnev’s work recalls medieval icons and 15th–18th-century Russian art at first glance. Upon closer examination, however, his paintings also reveal the influence of the 20th-century World of Art and Constructivist movements. Remnev studied at the Andrei Rublev Museum of Ancient Russian Culture and Art in the Andronikov Monastery in Moscow, home to a vast collection of Russian Orthodox icon paintings. Borrowing from traditional Russian painting in style, color palette, and technique, Remnev’s decorative portraits and scenes of Russian provincial life teem with symbolic details; their repetitive motifs and surrealistic tropes produce a hypnotic effect on their viewer. Remnev’s figures, frequently women, stand in the foregrounds of his paintings such that they appear monumental in comparison to the landscapes behind them, a pictorial device famously used by Leonardo da Vinci to portray his sitter’s primacy over the surroundings. He binds his natural pigments with egg yolk, emulating the tempera technique employed by Renaissance masters.