Alexander Iskin

Alexander Iskin (b. 1990) is a Russian-born artist living and working between Berlin and Mexico City. Born in Moscow, he moved to Germany with his family as a child. He studied Jewish Studies and Art History at Freie Universität Berlin and later Mathematics and Philosophy at Humboldt Universität Berlin. From 2010 to 2014, he worked in close partnership with the artist Herbert Volkmann.

Working primarily through painting, but also across sculpture, performance, film and writing, Iskin explores the instability of contemporary reality and the increasingly fluid boundaries between the physical, digital and imagined. He describes his artistic approach as “Interrealism”: a movement between different realities in which memory, mythology, technology, science and personal experience coexist. His paintings develop intuitively rather than from predetermined compositions, bringing together biomorphic figures, fragmented bodies, animals and ambiguous forms within densely layered pictorial spaces.

Iskin’s practice reflects his broad interests in philosophy, mathematics, artificial intelligence, genetics and the accelerating effects of digitalisation. Rather than treating these subjects analytically, he transforms them into speculative narratives and images in which fantasy and reality continually mutate into one another. Painting remains central to this process—what Iskin has described as his artistic “mother tongue”—and often becomes the starting point for projects that extend into other media and into lived experience.

His work has been exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at Mönchehaus Museum, Goslar; Kunstverein Uelzen; König, Mexico City; Track 16, Los Angeles; DSC Gallery, Prague; and SEXAUER, Berlin, among others. In 2020, he received the Kaiserring Scholarship in Goslar, followed by a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2021.
Portrait by Martin Schoeller