Andrey Esionov

Biography

In May 2022 Andrey Esionov’s paintings were hung simultaneously in seven historical churches in Rome. Among them were the Pantheon (Santa Maria ad Martyres), the Gesù, Sant’Andrea della Valle and San Lorenzo in Lucina. The exhibition, “The Way of Faith”, ran until October.

He was born on 30 November 1963 in Tashkent.

In 1981 he graduated from the Republican Specialised Music and Art Boarding School with a qualification as a graphic artist. In the same year, according to some accounts, he entered the Tashkent State Theatre and Art Institute named after Alexander Ostrovsky, where he received an academic education in the Department of Easel Painting. Little is known about his early period, his teachers or his first works. Student paintings of Tashkent survive, while he moved to Moscow later and made his mark there as a Muscovite only after 2010. The art historian Alexander Yakimovich, speaking of this, noted that before then the artist had for some twenty years hardly painted or drawn at all, and returned to it as a mature painter. I would not presume to say what he did in those years: there are no documents.

His first large shows came in 2013: the solo exhibition “Moscow and Muscovites” in the halls of the Russian Academy of Arts on Prechistenka, and its Paris version, “Moscou et moscovites”, at the Artspace Galleries. In 2014 there were exhibitions at the gallery of the Ministry of Regional Development (as part of the Year of Culture in Russia) and at the Zurab Tsereteli Art Gallery (“From A to Z in the Artist’s Space”).

In 2016 museum halls opened one after another: “Reflections in Coloured Water” at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and “Reflection” at the Stroganov Palace of the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. In 2017 came three cities in half a year: “Art of Transformations” at the Samara Art Museum (June to July), “Equilibrium” at the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan in Kazan (August to September) and “To Step in the River Twice” at the State Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan in Tashkent (October to December), that is, in the artist’s native city.

Since 2018 Esionov has been a full member of the Russian Academy of Arts (painting department). He is also an honorary academician of the Florentine Academy of Fine Arts and Drawing (Accademia delle Arti del Disegno), and has been a member of the Creative Union of Artists of Russia since 1995, as well as of the Moscow Artists’ Association of the International Art Fund and of the Union of Artists of Russia. In 2019 “Neonomadi e Autoctoni” was shown in Florence, in the halls of the Academy itself (March to April), and “Visionary Realism” ran at the San Salvatore in Lauro Museum in Rome (September 2019 to January 2020).

In 2021 the exhibition “Preliminary Results” opened at the Gallery of Contemporary Art of the State Museum of Fine Arts of Tatarstan in Kazan, and “Armed with Vision” at the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, in the wing known as “Ruin” (December 2021 to February 2022). After the Roman churches came “Portrait of the Artist…” at the Russian Academy of Arts (November to December 2023) and “Strangers” at the Bevilacqua la Masa Gallery in Venice, on Piazza San Marco (September 2024 to January 2025).

Critics describe his manner as contemporary painting on the edge of academism. Alexander Rozhin, editor-in-chief of The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine, wrote that Esionov uses no optical devices, film or photographic cameras, and creates a new reality by artistic means alone. His works are in the collections of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the State Russian Museum, museums in Kazan, Samara and Tashkent, the museum of the Florentine Academy, and also in the Vatican Museums and Roman church museums.

He received the gold medal of the Russian Academy of Arts in 2012, and in the same year won the Sixth Moscow International Arts Festival “Tradition and Modernity” in the painting category. The Academy’s Shuvalov Medal followed in 2016, the Medal of the Order “For Merit to the Fatherland”, second class, on 28 March 2019, and the Tair Salakhov Medal in 2023. He was named Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation on 11 February 2026.