Vadim Stepanov: Break of Dawn

Vadim Stepanov was born in 1969, in the former Soviet Union. In the age of 16 he started to work as an apprentice in Leonid Forigin's studio in Moscow. In 1991, Stepanov immigrated to Israel and became a prominent artist. His exceptional use of wood and choice of palette along with his unique painterly technique and mastery of the brush make this fascinating artist a unique phenomenon in the local art world. Stepanov's strive for perfection in every brush stroke is instantly recognized and is apparent in his drawings and sculptures alike. The themes used in Stepanov's work are all foreign to the Israeli ethos. By using Russian icons, Christian and North European pagan mythologies, he manages to create an inner world, where fantasy and reality become one. A world of dreams and nightmares in which forms seem to flicker and change before our eyes. Vadim Stepanov's paintings from the Break of Dawn series continue along the path of his earlier works, as well as opening up new and different areas. Their subject, as embodied in the title Break of Dawn, is the life forms that are enabled by and occur in the period between the end of the night and the beginning of the day, when the world and all within it are not exactly asleep and not truly awake. Stepanov slips through the elusive crack into that no man's land and stretches it to include a vista of dreamscapes and nightmares - dark, alarming and murky - from which spring various kinds of monstrous creatures, wandering souls that tumbled into ageless, genderless bodies found in a situation of distortion and agitation, transformation and becoming.