Alexei Lantsev

Born in Krasnodar in 1970, Alexei Lantsev is an abstract and semi-abstract painter. His boundary-defying works establish his place within a lengthy tradition of the Russian avant-garde. After graduating from the Moscow Surikov State Academic Institute of Fine Arts in 1996, Lantsev has pursued a highly international career, with over twenty solo exhibitions in Russia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Hong Kong. His work is held in museums and private collections around the world: from The National Bank of Iceland, to the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya Collection, to the Belgorod State Art Museum, to Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.

​

His artistic practice is a playful exploration of balance and harmony: a dance between the sensory and the structured. Working across a broad range of subjects (including traditional still life compositions, quiet harbour scenes and historic cityscapes) Lantsev consistently experiments with the viewer’s sense of scale, testing the limits of perception. ‘My challenge and task is to instantly capture the emotion of the viewer,’ he writes. Over a series of studio sessions, each work is ‘completely transformed’, with any ‘excess’ pared away: ‘the resolution of a painting,’ in Lantsev’s words, ‘is the result of an exchange between the anarchy of emotions interacting with the structure of logic.’