The interview of our ward by a talented artist

My name is Alexei Rumyantsev.
I work as a designer of church furniture for Orthodox churches. In addition, I am professionally engaged in contemporary art. Mostly, I work with installations and assemblies; occasionally,I return to the graphic art and sculpture.
I prefer the man-made production of my works, in which the handicraft component is a form of supplementing and rethinking the conceptual discourse in postdigital art.
My education as a professional artist was greatly promoted by the Open Culture Foundation, thanks to which, in 2014, I received a grant for free two-year training at the Institute of Problems of Contemporary Art, one of the oldest schools of contemporary art.
I especially came to go to school because the systematized knowledge of contemporary art was sorely lacking, which prevented full implementation of my own artistic projects. The school allowed me to fill these gaps; except for this,I got acquainted with the artistic environment, I got new friends and acquaintances from this environment. Thanks to this, new ideas, projects and methods of implementation appeared, since before that I was mainly engaged in graphics.

Such initiatives, when, in fact, there is a full-fledged individual curatorial work on developing creative potential, are unique, very valuable, and very demanded, especially since in schools such an individual approach is rarely practiced (at least that was two years ago).

If we talk about artists who influenced me, I would single out the classics from Anselm Kiefer with his picturesque assemblies and installations, Kurt Schwitters, and Robert Mallary, representatives of Dadaism and Neo-Dadaism. From modern African and Asian artists such as El Anatsui, Ibrahim Mahama, Tiharu Siota, etc. But most of all ,I am inspired by photographs of the microcosm or the world of people shot from a drone or a satellite with their topology, patterns, and fractals.