Alexey Dymdymarchenko (1986–2020) is known for his minimalist, amalgam-like artworks that embrace sound, material, and process. Although influenced by his own experience of living in a residential institution (called an internat, PNI in Russian) his work does not refer to particular social conditions but rather takes up the radical possibilities of abstraction. Dymdymarchenko himself was minimally verbal and created each drawing by taking a box of fragments of wax crayons, graphite pencils, or pastels and dumping it out over the paper as a visual, gestural, and auditory process. The resulting composition suggests clusters of marks, dots, dashes, smudges, and scratches, melted into voluminous, cloudy shapes that simultaneously connote sound spectrograms, natural textures or scrawled graffiti. Into these decontextualized, non-hierarchical surfaces constructed via dust and gesture, the artist inscribes his own narratives and creates a new form of autofiction at the time of the resurgence of figuration and identity politics in the arts.

Crip Ritual, Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto Scarborough, 2022

https://cripritual.com/dymdymarchenko/