Sasha
Zabaluev

SASHA ZABALUEV – author of fine and digital art, sculptor, member of the Eurasian Art Union (section of avant-garde painting), author of the Genuine Digital Art concept and Genuine Digital Manifesto: www.colordigital.art.

In 1986 she was born in the city of Rostov-on-Don – where she spent her childhood. She often visited Ufa, where her grandfather, inventor, machine tool designer, and artist, Yury Bokov lived. Mr. Bokov was fond of punch work, painted all his life, but he received an official art education only at the age of over forty years old. Yury Bokov worked at the Research Institute of Technology and Engine Production Organization in the city of Ufa and created more than forty unique inventions.

Sasha studied painting under his guidance.

No wonder Sasha's mother, Marina Yuryevna, also turned out to be prone to creative self-expression. Marina trained to be a fashion designer, but in her adult life she took up solving complex engineering problems in the design of dynamic advertising: she developed advertising objects, which would have been 15 meters in height.

From the early years, Sasha watched not only the artistic and inventive activities of her grandfather, but also the father of Nikolay Mikhaylovich, the author of patents for dental implants and a writer whose interest covered not only discoveries in the field of engineering, but also philosophy, classical literature and theology. The dualism of Sasha's relatives, in a sense, «divided» her. So, probably, that is what made the artist, in one of her incarnations, being interested in classical – easel – painting, in the other – engineering painting: that is the very digital art.

Sasha received her initial formal art education at the Chinenov A.S. and M.M. School of Art in Rostov-on-Don: she entered there at the age of 11. In addition, in 2012 she graduated from the Philosophy Faculty at the Rostov Institute of Philosophy and Socio-Political Sciences there.

An unusual creative journey started in the very early childhood: Sasha could spend hours with a brush and paints, without responding to the surrounding world; and anatomical atlas was her favorite book. Deep immersion and lack of interest in what was happening around gradually led her parents to the idea that the child might have autism. Somewhat later, the rejection of the rules in creativity and an unusual approach captured the attention of the school psychologist of Sasha. The woman witnessed how the girl «made drawings» on her skin with the help of sharp objects.

The young artist was hospitalized for suspected schizophrenia.

Sasha recalls: «Mom later told me that she was very scared, and Dad told her not to worry as she just saw the world differently».

Sasha Zabaluev really sees the world differently: it seems that she perceives reality from a different angle, through a special prism. This is evidenced by her expressive findings in painting and sculpture, as well as her unusual approach to understanding digital art. Sasha has a special talent that pushes her to express strong emotions (or maybe it itself consists of these emotions and did arise as a result of fine tuning that responds to the surrounding world – like a membrane of some kind of still unknown tool?), her expressive work with color and form destroys, on purpose or intentionally, existing rules and boundaries. As for digital art, here Sasha is attempting to rethink what artists have done in this area and create a completely new, supplemented by her own philosophy, which is gradually becoming a natural consequence of her difficult, but exciting, life and creative paths.

After graduating from her native Rostov-on-Don, the young artist moved to Moscow and entered the postgraduate course at the Philosophy Faculty of the Moscow State University.

For several years after that, Sasha lived and worked in the House of Artists, located at Bryusov Lane. Like many people of art, Sasha was demanding and critical of her works, and therefore she destroyed almost all the paintings created during that period.

Initially in Moscow, to earn her livelihood, Sasha developed ideological concepts for public, educational and commercial projects. Until 2015, she worked as a managing editor for the private American Studies’ journal «Terra America», and also as a designer of its printed version.

For two years, Sasha Zabaluev participated in the research work of an international interdisciplinary studio on the possibility of establishing a fully digital city. The atelier at different times included prominent figures in various fields of science, both foreign and domestic. Among them: Vladimir Malyavin (Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor at the Institute for European Studies at Tamkan University in Taiwan), Rob van Kranenburg (author of the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT)), Vladimir Arshinov (Doctor of Philosophy, Professor of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences), as well as Yury Gromyko, Ben Livshits (Brave blockchain project), Arkady Nedel and many others.

It makes wonder that it is this joint research activity that has made Sasha possible to rethink the meaning of the concept of «digital art», to formulate a clear distinction between physical work, its analog in the digital space, and, in fact, a purely digital work that exists exclusively in the digital space and does not have, cannot have an analog in the physical world. It all has come together in the Genuine Digital Art concept of («Genuine Digital Art»).

Unfortunately, in 2019, Sasha's psychological state worsened. After several months of severe depression and searching for new suitable treatments, the artist turned to Lacanian psychoanalysis. That allowed her to better understand herself and her specifics and forward her energy in the right direction. Naturally, that was reflected in her art: the study of psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan resulted in such works as «Death attraction. Self-portrait», «Discourse of Drama Queen», and others.      

For the past few years, Sasha Zabaluev has regularly participated in exhibitions in Russia and abroad. Her projects are exhibited in famous Russian museums and at world-famous fairs and expo.

Sasha describes her involvement in art not as a profession, but as a way of life in which «a heightened perception of reality is combined with a play of imagination, rigorous research work, study of new technologies and inventions».