/ About
About
the Artist
“Abstraction is not a departure from reality, but a way to be closer to the real.”
My work is a continuous exploration of the space between the visible and the invisible. Through abstraction I seek to express states, emotions and structures that exist beyond rational perception.
Read full biography →01 / Biography
Alexander Mikhaleff is a contemporary artist whose practice explores the space between visible form and inner perception.
Working primarily with painting and mixed media, he builds surfaces through accumulation, abrasion and repeated gesture. Each work develops slowly, holding traces of decisions that remain visible beneath the final layer.
His practice moves between private studio research and site-responsive exhibition projects across Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East.
02 / Artistic statement
Abstraction is not a departure from reality, but a way to be closer to the real.
My work begins before the image. It begins with a physical intuition — a density, a silence, a rhythm that has not yet found its structure.
I treat the canvas as a field of memory. Pigment is applied, removed and rebuilt until the work no longer illustrates an idea but carries its own presence.
03 / Studio
Between matter
and memory
The studio is treated as a field of attention: a place where gesture, accident and revision are allowed to remain visible.
04 / Selected CV
- 2026 — Inner Landscapes — Aspan Gallery, Almaty
- 2025 — States of Matter — Foundry Downtown, Dubai
- 2024 — Fragments — Spazio Orlandi, Milan
- 2023 — Beyond the Form — Project Room 11, New York
- 2022 — Silent Structures — Nord Raum, Berlin
05 / Selected press
- 2026 — Art Territory: The material life of abstraction
- 2025 — Surface Journal: Inside Alexander Mikhaleff’s studio
- 2024 — Contemporary Review: Painting after the image