Filipp Borisenok
My practice is grounded in an exploration of contemporary reality through the lens of personal experience. I am interested in the states that emerge from an individual’s encounter with the surrounding world: anxiety, inner tension, emotional exhaustion, as well as moments of recovery, resilience, and hope.
Space occupies a central place in my practice. It ceases to function as a background and instead acquires an active presence of its own.
Color establishes the emotional tone of the work, while the density of the painted surface allows me to convey different states — from fragility and tension to openness, vitality, and inner intensity.
Line serves different functions in my work. In some pieces, it emerges through scratching into the surface and acts as a gesture of destruction: disrupting the integrity of the painted mass, exposing its internal tension, and resisting the enclosure of the space. In others, the line appears as light openings and connections. It brings separate elements of the composition together, directs the movement of the viewer’s gaze, and creates a sense of internal interconnectedness.
The tension between destruction and connection becomes one of the key principles of my practice, through which I explore the relationship between the individual and their environment.
Фото: druzhkovsky.com
Acrylic is the primary material in my practice. Its properties allow me to combine transparent, layered structures with dense, textured surfaces while maintaining the immediacy and flexibility of the painting process.
Scale plays an important role in my work. While my earlier paintings were created in formats such as 80 × 60 cm and 100 × 80 cm, I now primarily work on canvases measuring 150 × 100 cm and larger. Increasing the scale enhances the physical presence of the work and deepens the viewer’s engagement with the pictorial space.
To date, I have completed more than fifty works. A selection of them was presented in the exhibition Dialogues Without Words at the Belyaevo State Gallery in Moscow.
My current practice is increasingly focused on working with space through large-scale painting, video art, objects, and installations. I am interested in expanding the experience of painting beyond the flat surface, allowing the work to exist as an autonomous environment that engages directly with the viewer.
Biography
I grew up surrounded by the art world. My father is an art historian and a consultant specializing in Soviet and Russian art. For many years, he has organized exhibitions and worked closely with artists, while his personal collection includes a significant body of postmodernist works.
Some of the artworks were always kept in his studio, while others were displayed in our home, constantly present in my field of vision wherever I went.Exhibitions, meetings, and conversations with artists were a natural part of our everyday life.
Over time, all of this shaped the way I came to see and understand the world.My first impulse to express myself emerged through professional dance, where I was able to build a successful career.
Later, painting became a natural continuation of this path.My interest in creating my own work quickly developed into a deeper study of art history, artistic movements, and the cultural contexts in which the works of great masters were created.
One of my main strengths, as I see it, is an intuitive and unforced approach to the creative process, without unnecessary heaviness or overcomplication, as well as a genuine enjoyment of making art itself.My main criterion is my inner compass — whether I like the work or not. It is a simple principle my father taught me.Some works come together within a few hours, almost intuitively, in a single burst of energy. In other cases, it is important to step back at the right moment, put the work aside, and allow it to “live” for a while independently of me.And once I manage to find the key to resolving such a work, it often becomes especially meaningful and dear to me.
Today, when my works find themselves alongside pieces from my father’s collection, I see not so much an endpoint as a journey — from the world of art that surrounded me from childhood to finding my own place within it.
Articles & Publications
EXHIBITIONS
Participant in the exhibition Dialogues with Abstraction and winner of the Social Abstraction category as part of the International Festival of Abstraction Arts — August 5–16, 2026.
Participant in the exhibition Dialogues Without Words
Belyayevo State Gallery, Moscow
October 2–26, 2025.
It takes a certain courage to stay true to abstract art in our age of clever concepts and meaning games. You could say that the Borisenok family has become the knights of this direction. Just recently, the Belyaevo Gallery hosted the finissage of a large-scale exhibition curated by Dmitry Butkevich and Karina Borisenok, featuring works from the father’s collection as well as pieces by the son — who, having grown up surrounded by paintings, has clearly absorbed a deep sense of color, composition, and refined taste from an early age.
Sergey Kavtaradze
The works from his father’s collection have undoubtedly influenced Filipp, who is now emerging as a distinctive and original artist. He draws on the traditions of his predecessors — you can clearly see the echoes of American neo-expressionism and abstraction. Yet he reinterprets and adapts these influences in his own way, developing a style that feels entirely his own.
Dmitry Butkevich
Photos by: druzhkovsky.com