Alexandr Antonov is a graphic artist working in Moscow, Russia.

Antonov belongs to the generation of masters who came to art in the 1970s and 1980s, and to this day have successfully continued to defend their right to a metaphorical, extremely conditional and subjective plastic language, to an allegorical, paradoxical interpretation of reality and a literary text. Antonov’s works are immediately recognizable thanks to bizarre surreal imagery, tangible texture, an eccentric, often completely irrational organization of space. The world of his images is unpredictable and misleading, catastrophically fragile and unstable, the grotesque-phantasmagoric habitat of the characters resembles the dilapidated, decaying theatrical scenery. Heroes and objects are in a state of precarious equilibrium: completely unable to stand upright (especially in the early cycles), they balance on an inclined plane, deform under the influence of powerful force fields, as if attracted to the ground by invisible magnets. Clouds, as a rule, float diagonally across the sky, buildings bend under their own weight, sway from the wind, while completely unexpected metamorphoses happen to animated characters. For example, the figure of Carroll’s Alice not only changes in size, but also becomes flat, cut into pieces, spreads out on steps and grows, together with the banked house. The work of Alexandr Antonov has become a very noticeable, indicative phenomenon in both book and easel graphics of the last four decades; many of the works that he illustrated are now difficult to imagine in a different pictorial interpretation. 

Dmitry Fomin