Aleksandr Naledin (b. 1986, Samara, Russia) is a Moscow-based artist working in painting and mixed media. Trained first as an architect, he practiced for a decade, designing spaces intended to improve people’s lives. What he also accumulated, room after room,...
Read MoreAleksandr Naledin (b. 1986, Samara, Russia) is a Moscow-based artist working in painting and mixed media. Trained first as an architect, he practiced for a decade, designing spaces intended to improve people’s lives. What he also accumulated, room after room, was a portrait of the people commissioning them — an inventory of how they wished to appear.
After turning fully toward contemporary art, Naledin completed his studies at the MMOMA School of Contemporary Art “Free Workshops” in Moscow. Drawing on his architectural background, he creates post-architectural figurative paintings about identity, social performance, and the body as constructed form.
In his work, the human figure behaves less like a stable individual than a structure shaped by roles, rituals, expectation, fear, desire, and status. Bodies may appear as façades, monuments, masks, uniforms, or objects; they are enlarged, compressed, hollowed, camouflaged, or emptied from within. The grotesque is central to Naledin’s practice, but not as ridicule. He uses distortion to reveal contradiction: the comic and the cruel, the theatrical and the vulnerable, the absurd and the sorrowful.
His paintings operate as mirrors of pressure rather than appearance. They do not simply ask what a person looks like, but what remains of the human figure when identity becomes façade, costume, armor, and spectacle.
Naledin’s work has been exhibited in Russia, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and Indonesia, and is held in private collections across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. He is represented by The Medium Gallery in Bali and DEL’ARTE Galerie in Switzerland.
