Ivan Novikov is an artist, curator, and educator. He works primarily in the media of abstract painting and installation. A prolonged investigation into the interrelations between ecological and artistic processes has had a particular influence on the development of his pictorial approach and technical method. Ivan is engaged in research and teaching in the fields of art theory and history, world — and particularly Asian — history, politics and religion, as well as in questions concerning the relationship between anthropology and art.
Over the past several years the artist has continued working on a series of blue monochromes. They embody reflections on the ambiguity of the future. In attempting to imagine it, the artist appeals to the sensation evoked by a particular shade of blue. Ivan deliberately limits his means of expression to blue monochromes. This is a framework set by the artist for a project that will continue until the vision of the desired future becomes reality.
Ivan Novikov was born in 1990 in Moscow. He graduated from the Moscow State Academic Art Institute named after V. I. Surikov (Surikov Institute), the Baza Institute, the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka), and the University of Manchester. He is a co‑founder of the independent platform Center "Red" in Moscow and a member of the editorial board of Art Magazine. He is Head of the Department of Painting at the Baza Institute. In 2015–2016 he received the Garage Museum Young Artists Support Program grant twice, and in 2017 he received a grant from the patronage program of the Cosmoscow Foundation. In 2015 and 2018 he was a finalist in the V‑A‑C Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) competition for acquisitions of works by young Russian artists for the museum’s collection. He was shortlisted for the Kandinsky Prize in the "Young Artist" category (2015), nominated for the Innovation Prize in the "Curatorial Project" category (2016) and in the "Book of the Year" category (2021), and nominated for the Anatoly Zverev Prize (2021).
Works are held in the collections of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Moscow, Russia), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow, Russia), the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow, Russia), AZ Museum (Moscow, Russia), Zarya Center for Contemporary Art (Vladivostok, Russia), Kin Museum of Contemporary Art (Kiruna, Sweden), Kultdjurhuset – Kultivator (Öland, Sweden), and in a number of private and corporate collections.