I grew up in two cultures shaped by traditional masculinity — Russia and Israel — and I make work from inside the question those cultures hand a man without asking. The studio is in Ashkelon. The work is slow. There is no hurry to finish it.
Chapter 01Two cultures, one question
I was born in 1987 in Dudinka, a town in northern Russia most maps don’t bother to print at the right size. I came to Israel young, studied at Bezalel in Jerusalem, graduated in 2015, and have worked from a studio in Ashkelon ever since. Both places taught me a particular shape of being a man — what it should look like, what it should not show — and the photographs are made against that shape.
The work is not autobiographical, exactly. The body in front of the lens is often my own, but the question it asks is broader: what does an alternative look like? What does a man look like when he is not performing invulnerability? The answer, plate by plate, is what the studio is producing.
Chapter 02Photography as questioning
Through self-portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, I construct visual narratives that reflect shifting states of mind — blending the intimacy of the domestic with the vastness of the natural world. The photograph is never the point on its own. It is the part you can hold while the question is being asked.
“My practice offers alternative representations of male identity, grounded in vulnerability, ambiguity, and emotional depth.”
The early mixed-media photography work — DECONSTRUCTED REALITY, FRAMED REFLECTION, ORACLE RITUAL — sits inside that grammar. The image is broken on purpose, then rebuilt: a way of refusing the fixed-self the inherited norms keep insisting on.
Chapter 03Why mixed media
A photograph is light caught and held still. Mixed media — torn prints, paint, collage, hand-finishing — puts the time back in. It says the body in the image is also a thing, also material, also subject to weather and damage and repair. It refuses the cleanness of the photograph as the last word.
Chapter 04The Red Grey series
Red Grey is the longest-running series. Nine canvases at the moment, each torn photographic fragments of the body suspended in fields of gestural red paint on grey. Originals — one of one. The colour choice is not symbolic. The red is what the body looks like from the inside; the grey is what it looks like from outside, in the weather an Ashkelon afternoon makes. Both are accurate. Together, they are the work.
Chapter 05What the studio is for
The studio is two rooms. The work is made by hand and edited slowly. Acquisitions, press, and visits are arranged directly — there is no gallery in between. The aim is not output. The aim is one alternative to the inherited shape, made visible enough that someone else can also choose it.
