Nikolai Grigoriev

I make a life visible so that it can be lived as a work of art. The life is my own. A body records itself without being asked. Day after day those traces, the depth of sleep, the evenness of breath, pass into the painting by one unchanging rule, and the painting changes as I change. Nothing is arranged by hand. As long as I keep living, it keeps being painted.

My material is living itself. The work never shows me the present. A day becomes a painting only after it has closed, when there is no one left to perform for. What remains is the day, and being in it. When the life falls silent, the painting fades. When the days resume, it returns. Every day it has lived is kept. This way of painting is built to outlast one life: when my days end, another living body can take up the rule, and the canvas goes on being written from a stranger's days.

Nikolai Grigoriev (b. 1987, Moscow) is a conceptual artist living and working in Barcelona. His work turns the daily record of a single living body, his own, into painting: one image a day since 2022, made by one unchanging rule that never repaints the past. The work changes as he changes and stills when the life falls silent. He came to art late and built its language himself.