Volo Bevza’s primarily abstract oil paintings negotiate the omnipresence of the internet and its floods of images within the classical field of painting. His works are preceded by a hybrid, cross-media process of creation that questions perspectives of painting and content mediation. Central to the artist’s work is the significance of the panel painting in the post- digital age. From his artistic beginnings in the field of stage design until today, fragmented and deconstructed messages influence his work. He translates visual information, such as widely circulating images in media but also his own photographs, via a software and then transfers them to the canvas. The conversion from the real to the digital and finally to the analogue painting leads to multiple connotations of the painterly result. Similarly, the painting gives rise to set pieces for video works that expand the artist’s repertoire with digital moving images. Digital processes are used as a means of alienation, just like painting itself, whose supposed illusionism is exposed as a lie. This approach is extended by analogue approaches such as painting over photographs – Bevza’s conscious confrontation with print media and classical print products. “Painterly gestures thus confront the (alleged) facts,” the artist explains. Here, the special potential of the interweaving of digital, computer-generated art, interrogation of reality, media juxtaposition and the painter’s personal handwriting becomes apparent.

Volo Bevza (born 1993 in Kyiv, Ukraine) studied scenography at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv from 2010 to 2014. In 2015, he began studies in painting at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin in the class of Prof. Friederike Feldmann and Prof. Werner Liebmann, which he completed as a master student in 2019. Bevza’s works have since then been shown in solo shows at the Mironova Foundation and WTFoundation in Kyiv as well as at Fahrenheit Berlin (2021). They were also part of group shows at the Stiftung Neue Kunst Berlin- Brandenburg (2022) and Kunstquartier Bethanien as well as Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz in Berlin (2017). In 2012, Volo Bevza received the ELEVA prize in the field of realistic drawing and was recently a guest in the discourse format ‘Studio Bonn’ at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (April 2022). Since the beginning of the year, Bevza has held a teaching position at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. The artist lives and works in Berlin.

Text: Antonia Rittgeroth