Nikita Kosmin

Nikita is distinguished not only by the fact that he is good at painting, but that he can see. And what he sees is not always pretty. It is characterized by violence, darkness, but also by humor and hope. The son of a working-class family, born in 1988 on the Volga as the youngest of three siblings, seems to have sprung from his own pictures. Growing up at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, he saw his life in the dark facets of hopelessness and lack of prospects that surrounded him. When the family moved to Germany in the late 1990s, the artist's young life was increasingly characterized by a lack of belonging, by not understanding and not being understood, and ultimately by the language of violence. Only through painting, which had always accompanied him through life, did he find a form of expression that was better able to express what he could not put into words. The shadowy worlds of the past and the immediate reality of his life are sometimes cruel and gloomy, sometimes colorful and humorous in his works. The works do not have to please. They show perspectives. images. snapshots.