ZEBRAS ARE VERY BEAUTIFUL
Stepan Lysenko’s Solo Exhibition
Excise Hall, Winzavod Contemporary Art Center
15 May — 3 June 2025, Moscow
Excise Hall, Winzavod Contemporary Art Center
15 May — 3 June 2025, Moscow
Stepan Lysenko — Zebras Are Very Beautiful
The solo exhibition Zebras Are Very Beautiful by Stepan Lysenko is an artistic reflection on the possibility of joyful escapism and the rediscovery of oneself as an author within a harsh environment.
The exhibition space is filled with sculptural self-portraits of the artist captured in different temporal states. A crowd of children watching a zebra in a pool, a family portrait with a palm tree, a man in a banana suit — these are the key figures and images that populate the artist’s personal mythology. All of them are guests gathered for a festive party. In Zebras Are Very Beautiful, the artist’s sculptural self-portraits do not strive for mimetic accuracy; instead, they naively emphasize their difference from the “original,” as if the original had been lost — or perhaps never existed at all. In this new sculptural series, Lysenko transforms the self-portrait from an act of fixation into a processual form of self-observation, viewing identity as a multiple, fluid construct, impossible to pin down.
In his solo exhibition, Lysenko once again undertakes a visual escape from reality, turning to the feeling of celebration and substituting the surrounding world — one that cannot be accepted — with an imagined one. By consciously rejecting adulthood, he surrounds himself with exotic animals, plants, and fictional characters that populate the artist’s ideal world — an aesthetic inversion of reality. Childhood, in this context, ceases to be a stage of development and becomes a mode of artistic existence, free from the contradictions of the adult world.
The project Zebras Are Very Beautiful immerses the viewer in a contemplation of the nature of pattern, the beauty and uniqueness of every copy. Within the exhibition, the idea of pattern as an act of aesthetic repetition becomes the foundation of the artist’s creative existence. For Lysenko, visual excess is a means of distancing himself from reality, and repetition becomes a futile attempt at self-fixation.
And perhaps it is precisely here — at this bright yet melancholic celebration — that something impossible in reality becomes attainable: the ability to be oneself, without the need to explain who you truly are.
The solo exhibition Zebras Are Very Beautiful by Stepan Lysenko is an artistic reflection on the possibility of joyful escapism and the rediscovery of oneself as an author within a harsh environment.
The exhibition space is filled with sculptural self-portraits of the artist captured in different temporal states. A crowd of children watching a zebra in a pool, a family portrait with a palm tree, a man in a banana suit — these are the key figures and images that populate the artist’s personal mythology. All of them are guests gathered for a festive party. In Zebras Are Very Beautiful, the artist’s sculptural self-portraits do not strive for mimetic accuracy; instead, they naively emphasize their difference from the “original,” as if the original had been lost — or perhaps never existed at all. In this new sculptural series, Lysenko transforms the self-portrait from an act of fixation into a processual form of self-observation, viewing identity as a multiple, fluid construct, impossible to pin down.
In his solo exhibition, Lysenko once again undertakes a visual escape from reality, turning to the feeling of celebration and substituting the surrounding world — one that cannot be accepted — with an imagined one. By consciously rejecting adulthood, he surrounds himself with exotic animals, plants, and fictional characters that populate the artist’s ideal world — an aesthetic inversion of reality. Childhood, in this context, ceases to be a stage of development and becomes a mode of artistic existence, free from the contradictions of the adult world.
The project Zebras Are Very Beautiful immerses the viewer in a contemplation of the nature of pattern, the beauty and uniqueness of every copy. Within the exhibition, the idea of pattern as an act of aesthetic repetition becomes the foundation of the artist’s creative existence. For Lysenko, visual excess is a means of distancing himself from reality, and repetition becomes a futile attempt at self-fixation.
And perhaps it is precisely here — at this bright yet melancholic celebration — that something impossible in reality becomes attainable: the ability to be oneself, without the need to explain who you truly are.
( III )
Gallery
