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Andrei Rabodzeenko is an American painter, sculptor, and graphic artist. Born in the USSR in 1961, he studied at the Mukhina School of Art and Design in Leningrad (St. Petersburg, Russia). He lives and works in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Using varied media and styles, he explores humanist and philosophical concerns such as the tension between innocence and self-awareness, rationality and intuition, technology and morality, creation and destruction, knowledge and belief. He is best known for his oil paintings, working in two distinct styles: Archetypes, a surrealistic approach using a Renaissance pictorial vocabulary, and Metaphysics, a symbolic naïve style.

His paintings, drawings, and sculptures are in private and public collections, including the Loyola University Museum of Art (Chicago), Skokie Northshore Sculpture Park (Skokie, IL), and Emmanuel College, Cambridge University (UK).

Archetypes
Archetypes present “a purer vision of what it means to be human.”  They are a body of surrealistic oil paintings rendered in a realistic-ideal style that synthesizes the pictorial language of the Renaissance and classical antiquity. The visually clear, realistic, allegorical and symbolic imagery of these works allows viewers to distance themselves from the present moment in order to “critically appraise our time’s values against the values that are considered to be ‘timeless.’” In the words of a reviewer, “Rabodzeenko’s Soviet education is on display in his paintings. He offsets the rigor and classical elegance of academic technique with visual narratives and flourishes of wit that spring from a probing mind and fertile imagination.”

Metaphysics
Metaphysics use a naïve and symbolic style to explore the mysteries of the human world, past, present, and future. “There are glimpses of other realities, pieces of childhood dreams, shadows and voices of unknown origin. The shape-shifting characters are bodiless and elusive; they travel through planes of space and time.” These works layer imagery in a flat picture plane, with recurring figures such as a wolf-dog, daggers, wheels, crescent moons, and spirits.

Sculptures and installations
Trained as an architect of small structures, he works comfortably in three dimensions. His sculptural projects range from large-scale public sculptures such as “Wing,” now permanently installed at the Skokie Northshore Sculpture Park, to the more intimate sculptural paintings of his recent “Projections” series, about which a reviewer said that “he seamlessly moves from virtuosic trompe l’oeil illusionism to flat advertising illustration to religious icon painting.” His self-portrait is painted in a style “reminiscent of the mood in Rembrandt’s self-portraits.”

Life
Andrei Rabodzeenko was born in 1961 in Frunze (now Bishkek), Kyrgyzstan, USSR, to a family of artists. From 1976-1980 he studied painting and drawing at the Benkov School of Art in Tashkent. From 1980-1985 he completed his studies in interior design and architecture at the Mukhina School of Design in Leningrad (now Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, in St. Petersburg, Russia), which included classical training in drawing and painting. He lives and works in Chicago.

Press
Letts, K. A. “Projections: An Interactive Portrait Project,” Rustbelt Arts, December 2, 2016

Alamo-Costello, Chester. “Andrei Rabodzeenko – Technotropic Romance & Other Works,” The Comp Magazine, August 10, 2015

McKean, Lise. “Zeitgeist on Show in Recent Work by Damien Deroubaix and Andrei Rabodzeenko,” Bad at Sports blog, July 31, 2015

Shurgaya-Vereiskaya, Vera. “The Visual Circle of Being or Vision of Another World,” Petersburg Curators’ Notebooks, St. Petersburg, Russia, 36, 2015, 287-292

Cottet, Colleen. “Summer at LUMA features three very different ways of looking at the sacred,” Chicago Reader, July 7, 2015

Kaminski, Simon. “With All Our Knowledge” (interview with artist Andrei Rabodzeenko), LiteraruS, 1 (38), Helsinki, January 2013, 54-60

Elagina, Elena. "A Happy Artist," Severnaya Avrora, St. Petersburg, Russia, September 2009, 167-183

Lokot’kov, Nikolai. "Featured Artist: Andrei Rabodzeenko," Vvedenskaya Storona, Staraya Russa, Russia, No. 2, June 2007, 30-31

Gehring, Stephanie. "Artist gets by with a little help from his family, bringing his inspiration from the USSR," Daily Southtown, Chicago, Mar. 22, 2006, Local, 1, 6

Stein, Lisa. "Art portrait show takes unique view of patrons' faces," Chicago Tribune, November 14, 2003, Section 7, 17

Wiederhold, Matthew. "In the mind of Andrei Rabodzeenko: Complex Paintings at 20 North Gallery," Toledo City Paper, Toledo, OH, June 2002, 11

Anderson, Jon. "Ukrainian art exhibit almost all in family," Chicago Tribune, January 8, 2002, Metro Section, 3

Bayne, Martha. "Gallery Tripping: A kind of, not really, almost totally Ukrainian show," Chicago Reader, January 4, 2002, 23

Vallongo, Sally. "Father and son paint across generation gap," Toledo Blade, Toledo, OH, June 15, 1997, Arts & Entertainment section, 1