Oleksandr Balbyshev " Bunny Boy" (2023) Painting by Oleksandr Balbyshev
- Oil on Canvas
- Dimensions Height 29.5in, Width 21.7in
- Artwork's condition The artwork is in perfect condition
- Framing This artwork is not framed
- Categories Male Nudes
About the artwork
I like to look at a beautiful male body. Therefore, I am sad that there are so little masculine sensuality and beauty in the art world. About 30 years ago, a group of feminist artists, Guerrilla Girls, decided to determine the ratio of male and female nudes presented on canvases exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It turned out that male nudes are only 15%. And it seems that today the situation has not changed much. On online galleries where I sell my art, male nudes are about 20%.
While the female nude is generally regarded as a staple on the finest of museum walls, the male nude has managed to maintain an air of illicitness up until the present day, continuing to trouble people in different ways.
This phenomenon's root cause is because art history was a “white straight men only” club for a long time. Its creators have used mechanisms of suppression of rights and marginalization of minorities. And the culture of the dominant patriarchal and heterosexual discourses is still influential.
I would like to see our culture represent naked men as frequently as we do naked women to remove the shock value of the nude male. And this is my goal as an artist. I use the male nude to express erotic feelings like the female nude has been used. I am trying to explore the slippage of masculinity and redefine what it means to be male.
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Related themes
Oleksandr Balbyshev is a contemporary Ukrainian artist. The most important themes in Balbyshev’s art are male sexuality and sensuality. Artist wants the viewer to see the realm of ideas in faces and bodies, not only a realistic image of a human. He tries to combine in his paintings realities, as visions of worlds within worlds. They show us an image of ourselves and also hint that there is more to us than we know.
Oleksandr Balbyshev is famous for transforming classical Soviet-era portraits of Lenin into highly decorative and chaotic works of art. Artist finds original portraits and sculptures of Lenin made in the Soviet era on flea markets and on announcements on the Internet. He paints on top of old portraits of Lenin fragments from famous paintings or drip paint on them, cut the canvases into pieces and glue them in a chaotic manner, let them paint them for children, he paints the sculptures in funny colors and glues them with various objects. As a result of this artistic gesture, the artist erases the propaganda and ideological meanings of the image, at the same time endowing it with decorative qualities. However, with all the fun of this manipulation, the artwork acquires new meanings, an antinomical combination of play and seriousness, prompting the viewer to go beyond the accepted paradigm.
Oleksandr Balbyshev was born in 1985 in Ukraine. His paintings are in private collections in the USA, Canada, United Kingdom, , Netherlands, , Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Croatia, South Africa, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, Mexico, and Japan.
- Nationality: UKRAINE
- Date of birth : 1985
- Artistic domains:
- Groups: Ukrainian Contemporary Artists
Oleksandr Balbyshev, bright paintings 
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