Artist
Ivan Kashdan
Ivan works across painting, animation and video games. The process of fiction-production always leaves behind temporary supports and structures. Ivan is focused on this detritus - the big theatrical backdrops, never to be used again; the marks of repeated erasure on stop-animation boards; old stage-flats. He reclaims these used objects so they can tell stories of their own.
Ivan’s paintings imagine inanimate objects coming to life, coming untethered from their functions. He explores possibilities for these characters using drawing materials, acrylic and ink to keep the painting process fast and responsive. The resultant compositions contain imaginary life forces. Gentle, aquatic, nebulous entities which welcome the viewer into a lightweight, alternative reality where even the heaviest of objects participates in ecological communion.
He studied at Slade School of Fine Art, after training at Bournemouth Film School. In London, he has exhibited at Staffordshire St Gallery, The Tub Gallery, created a 10m theatrical backdrop for Bloomsbury Theatre, and painted a 17m mural for Room2 Hotel, Chiswick.
"My work is something like that of a naturalist, who studies non-human life. Except this life is imaginary - a study of what isn’t (and perhaps should be) there."
AVAILABLE ARTWORKS
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May Drop 2025
"Three new works exploring crowd control and simulation. 1 more painting made on stage-flats. 7 more boards from 2023, taken from a hand-drawn animation. Three more early paintings." - Whirligig, Ivan Kashdan
The Artist Open Call Collection 2023
“A phantasmagoria of man-made objects, brought to life through colour and accumulated marks. Perhaps the opposite of a still-life. A life that won’t sit still, present in all things - a latent animism. Paintings from 2021-2023 exploring this alternate world.” - Ivan Kashdan, Machines Have Lucid Dreams
