This Painter Captures the Elusive Beauty of Ordinary Life

Walking inside Misha Nikatin’s studio in Moscow’s bohemian Basmanny neighbourhood feels like stepping into a particularly vibrant greenhouse. Plants surround you: the real ones carefully potted, with Nikatin’s painted copies filling in the gaps. Nikatin has been working from this bright studio, tucked inside a former power plant, for three years. The practical, industrial aesthetic suits him well.

More: Instagram h/t: calvertjournal

Nikatin’s paintings often depict everyday life objects: a designer chair, a bright red car, a house plant. His paintings are evocative in their stillness and have a calm, almost meditative nature. An electronic clock which stopped at 20:20, a sunset glowing through window blinds, a car under a deep blue dust sheet: these are slices of seemingly unremarkable day-to-day life, fleeting fragments of mundanity elevated to the state of art. Our capitalist reality, against all odds, becomes a continuation of the artistic canon.

“We live in such a strong emotional field of branding, that everything around us is buzzing with headings, brands, labels, and it’s almost impossible to ignore it. I get a certain aesthetic story from things, and when I draw an object like a car, I consciously choose this object because I already understood what this brand is about, its ethics, and why I want to immortalize it in a painting,” says Nikatin.