Vladimir Grig

Biography

The artist’s real surname is Grigorashchenko; his full name is Vladimir Nikolayevich Grigorashchenko, and “Grig” became his professional name. He was born on 21 March 1962 in Krasnodar and graduated from the art college there in 1987.

For the first years he worked as an illustrator for publishing houses. In the 1990s he joined the Artists’ Union; by some accounts this was in 1990 and the Artists’ Union of the USSR, by others the Artists’ Union of Russia, and I would not insist on one wording here. His first exhibitions were held in Krasnodar (1992) and in Heidelberg (1993). Then came shows in St Petersburg, Moscow and Sochi, and also in Germany and Austria.

The list of his appearances at large shows is long and fairly even: the Biennale of Graphic Art in Krasnodar (1994), the St Petersburg international biennale Spatia Nova (1996), “Russian Days in Germany” (2003), the Baltic States biennales of graphic art in Kaliningrad (2008 and 2013). From 2004 to 2013 he exhibited at the Art Moscow fair. In 2013 panels and objects from the series “Dimensionen III” were shown in the parallel programme of the 55th Venice Biennale, and in the autumn of 2015 the project “Who Am I? Where Am I?” was part of the parallel programme of the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.

Grig was written about most often because of his projects at the meeting point of art and science. In the autumn of 2008 he made an installation at the Dokuchaev Central Soil Science Museum in St Petersburg, as part of the festival “Contemporary Art in a Traditional Museum”. A year later “Underground Kingdom” appeared there: an exact model of a soil tunnel, made with the support of the Dynasty Foundation of Dmitry Zimin. The project won the foundation’s first prize. Another work in the same vein was shown at the exhibition “Life: Science Version” at Winzavod, a contemporary art centre in Moscow, in 2011. In 2014 his objects and installations were included in the Polytechnic Museum’s exhibition “Russia Is Doing It Itself” in Pavilion 26 at VDNKh, the exhibition grounds in Moscow, and in the project “Heroic Cantata for Crickets with Orchestra” he returned once more to the soil science museum.

Drawing remains his main language. The art historian Alexander Borovsky, introducing Grig at an exhibition of contemporary drawing at the State Russian Museum, spoke of the comic strip and of “post-drawing”, that is, a combination of graphic art with other forms of visual art. In 2014 Borovsky chose him to illustrate his children’s book “Broken Telephone”. Dmitry Pilikin, deputy director of the Diaghilev Museum of Contemporary Art at St Petersburg State University, saw in his manner the influence of Soviet print design of the 1950s and 1960s, and the art historian Marek Bartelik compared Grig with the Moscow Conceptualists of the 1970s.

Besides visual art, Grig plays in the group Melonoise with Dmitry Tykvin and Dmitry Shubin. The group performs improvised music, and he sings and plays guitar and other instruments. He also took part in projects of the St Petersburg Improvisers Orchestra.

In 1993 Grig received the regional Konstantin Rossinsky Prize, in 1995 a scholarship from the Berlin Academy of Arts, and in 1999 first prize at the Krasnodar Festival of Contemporary Art. He was a nominee for the Sergey Kuryokhin Prize in 2011 (the sculptural group “Game”) and for the Kandinsky Prize in 2012 (the project “Kustrakita over the River”).

In recent years his exhibitions have been held at the Gridchinhall gallery in the Moscow region: “Arrived” (2017), “Detomon. Stories in Pictures” (2019), “Once Upon a Time in a Shining Forest...” (2024). In 2018 the State Russian Museum showed him in “Looking for a Modern Style” at the Marble Palace, in 2024 in “The Message”, and in 2025 the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow held the project “Thank You for Being Dreams”. Grig’s works are held by the State Russian Museum, the Kovalenko Krasnodar Regional Art Museum, the Dokuchaev Soil Science Museum, the Kaliningrad State Art Gallery, the National Library of Russia and the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Mexico.