Vladimir Kush is a Russian born surrealist painter and sculptor. He studied at the Surikov Moscow Art Institute, and after several years working as an artist in Moscow, his native city, he emigrated to the United States, eventually establishing his own gallery on the island of Maui in Hawaii. His oil paintings are also sold as giclée prints which contributed to his popularity and led to the establishment of further galleries in Laguna Beach, California, Las Vegas, and Nevada. In 2011 Kush won the First Prize in Painting at the Artistes du Monde international exhibition in Cannes.
Biography
Kush was born in 1965 in Moscow, Russia. After studying at the Surikov Moscow Art Institute, he was conscripted into the Soviet Army for two years where he was assigned to paint murals. In 1987, he began exhibiting with the USSR Union of Artists but earned a living drawing portraits on the streets of Moscow and caricatures for a newspaper. In 1990, following his first foreign exhibition in Germany with two other Russian artists, he emigrated to the United States, initially living in Los Angeles before moving to Hawaii where he also worked as a mural painter for the Whaler's Village Museum on Maui. While based in Hawaii, his works received several exhibitions in Hong Kong galleries. Gallery shows followed in Seattle, Pittsburgh, and other American cities, and he eventually opened his own gallery, Kush Fine Art in Lahaina, Hawaii. He later opened Kush Fine Art galleries in Las Vegas and Laguna Beach, California. Many of his original oil paintings are also sold as giclée prints which initially contributed to his popularity. In 2007 Kush sued the pop singerPink and her record company for copyright infringement when imagery from his painting, Contes Erotiques, was used without his authorisation for her 2006 video U + Ur Hand. The case was settled the following year when the singer agreed to pay him undisclosed damages. Prints and an original oil painting by Kush are held in the NaPua Gallery collection at the Grand Wailea Resort on Maui in addition to works held in private collections. In July 2011 his works were shown at the Artistes du Monde international exhibition in Cannes where he won the American First Prize in Painting. He also has a resident show in Las Vegas, Nevada, at Caesar's Palace. In 2019, Kush filed a lawsuit against pop singer Ariana Grande for copyright infringement when his paintings The Candle and The Candle 2 was used without permission in her music video God is a woman. The lawsuit is now settled.
Style and works
Kush predominantly works in the medium of oil painting on canvas or board, with many of the original paintings also sold as limited edition giclée-on-canvas prints. His bronze-colored sculptures are small-scale and usually based on imagery from his paintings, such as Walnut of Eden and Pros and Cons. Although his style is frequently described as surrealist, Kush himself refers to it as "metaphorical realism" and cites the early influence on his style of Salvador Dalí's surrealist paintings as well as landscapes by the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. Another influence on his work has been the 16th century Dutch painterHieronymus Bosch, known for his fantastic imagery and sometimes characterised as "the pre-Surrealism Surrealist". Wings, ships, and color-saturated seascapes are frequent themes in his paintings, exemplified in the companion pieces, Arrival of the Flower Ship and Departure of the Winged Ship. Flowing water is another recurrent theme, exemplified by Breach and Current. Other works such as Three Graces and African Sonata merge human and animal forms with inanimate objects.
List of paintings
Original paintings by Kush include:
African Sonata – Elephants with giant tubas for faces are depicted at a watering hole on the plains of Africa.
Arrival of the Flower Ship – A white sailing ship approaches harbour on a calm sea. Its sails are depicted as giant pink flowers. Shadowy human figures approach the ship in small boats, each made from a single flower petal, while others watch from shore.
Breach – Shown in the 1997 exhibit "From Gulag to Glasnost: Contemporary Art from Russia" at the International Images Gallery near Pittsburgh, the painting depicts a drained ocean surrounded by mountains, with a group of human figures in the foreground tossing a giant whale on a tarpaulin made of the sea water.
Current – The painting depicts the solitary figure of a naked man rowing a small boat through swirling water in a flooded landscape.
Departure of the Winged Ship – Widely reproduced as a print, the painting depicts a three-masted sailing ship heading out to the open sea on a windy day. Its sails are formed by giant butterflies.
Family Tree – A house is depicted as a giant tree with its upper branches still in construction. Greg Stacey wrote in OC Weekly: "It's like something out of a Bosch painting, a work any artist could be proud of. But ugh, that literal-minded title!"
Three Graces – Three dancing ballerinas on a chessboard-like stage are depicted with spinning tops for legs.
Wind – An isolated two-storey house is depicted with a huge blue shirt billowing out of its roof and windows while shadowy human figures gather with ladders. A giant pocket watch hangs from a chain over the side of the building.
Winged Satellite – A giant moth is depicted circling the earth as a metallic satellite with solar panel wings.
Publications
Kush, Vladimir. Metaphorical Journey. Kush Fine Art New York Inc.
