KIMJAESUN Gallery is very pleased to announce Ilya Butusov, this exhibition is his first solo show in Korea. Diligent work of many years on his own creative parlance has rewarded the artist with a unique painting technique based on glazing skills used by the old-school masters. At first glance, his artworks lack some distinctness, the shapes are fuzzy and lost over a distance, but seeming airiness of the images hide hard work of successive application of multilayered lacquer mixed with paints to produce such inimitable visual effect. Gradually, out of the background, a viewer is run with new gauze-free details which create an integral image delivering some history. Most of all, it is the history of a Human Being, for his fellow creatures in all possible guises is the main object of Ilya Butusov’s painting – almost all his artworks of the recent years depict an individual sometimes alone, sometimes interlaced with the others in social medium.  The artist has an affection towards naked models, in which case the nudity is not a goal in itself, it is the way to bare the privacy of one’s mind. Removing the clothes, he exposes the souls of his characters, and denuded person reverts to its true inward nature unveiling the forced disguises.   

Ilya Butusov’s artworks are difficult to confuse with other painters – they stand out pronouncedly not only because of his out of the beaten line in painting, but because of his philosophic approach to life, his attempt not to merely capture the image, but to interpret the key insights of the swift-flowing life.  His artworks are in the collections in various museums and contemporary art galleries both y in Russia and abroad, including Korea, China, Taiwan, and the USA). He and his family live in the city of Vladivostok, Primorye, Russia.

Ilya Butusov was born in 1963 in the city of Magadan in the north-east of Russia on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk. In 1981 he finished a Magadan art school and went to the city of  Khabarovsk to study at the painting department of the Pedagogical  institute (1981-1984). Then he continued his higher education at the Far – Eastern institute of arts in Vladivostok (1986-1992). Since finishing his education Ilya Butusov had been a freelancer until 2006 when he joined the Far Eastern Academy of Fine Arts in Vladivostok as an assistant professor at the painting department where he has worked till now.

In 2004 he became a fellow of the Creative Union of the Russian painters and in 2007 joined the All-Russia Union of Painters, he is also an executive secretary of the Primorye division of the said Union. Since 1988 Ilya Butusov has participated in both Russian and international exhibitions, his first solo exhibition was in 1993 in Stuttgart, Germany, then followed solo shows in Vladivostok (2002, 2006, 2010) and Taipei (2009).  In 2005 he was awarded a silver medal of the Russian Ministry of Culture “For contribution to Culture”