КОНСТАНТИН БЕНКОВИЧ
The young and innovative artist Konstantin Benkovich was born in 1981 in a small town near Saint Petersburg, the cultural capital of Russia. He graduated from the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, the Faculty of Monumental and Decorative Arts in 2007 with a major in Artistic Metalworking.
Benkovich challenges the established order in the art world with his work: where individuals such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are deified in the art scene, Konstantin offers resistance; where these artists – working with brilliant production teams, innovative techniques, expensive materials and large investments – are honored worldwide and at a museum level, Benkovich excels by working on a conceptual level and with affordable materials. Results are achieved by simply surpassing other artists. In recent years, the artist’s work has mainly been dominated by major projects and museum exhibitions.
Benkovich achieved great success in 2016 with a major project, called Koons’ Dog , right in front of the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. The sculpture was made of steel wire, and was a counterpart to the well-known Balloon Dog artworks by Jeff Koons. Konstantin in his projects publicly speaks out against corruption at all levels of government.
Since 2017, the yellow duck has become a real symbol of the corruption component of today’s regimes, and not only in Russia. Many of Benkovich’s works are made of rebar and represent gratings, symbolizing unjustified expectations from modern authorities, their desire to restrict freedom of people, be it a prison sentence for dissent or attempts to restrict freedom of speech and thought, because this trend is gaining momentum not only in regime states, but, as we can see, on social networks, which were created as a platform for completely free expression of opinions. In addition to this success, the artist is active in various places in Europe, such as in Montenegro for projects in the cities of Kotor and Budva.
Konstantin Benkovich, in collaboration with Pussy Riot and a number of other well-known Russian artists, participated in the group exhibition “Russian Post-Soviet Actionism” at the Saatchi Art Gallery in London at the end of 2017, various public projects worldwide, exhibitions in the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow (2021) and the exhibition “Millennials in Contemporary Russian Art” running today in the Russian State Museum in Saint-Petersburg.
Artworks of Benkovich are in the permanent museum collections and in many private collections around the globe.