"Afonskiy paints Paris the way his forebears painted Moscow: with the patient eye of academic realism turned on ordinary life."
Born in Moscow in 1993 into a family of painters, Ivan Afonskiy inherited a tradition of Russian and Soviet academic realism that he has since turned toward his adopted city. Now living in exile in Paris, he paints the ordinary textures of his new life there — his neighbourhood, his apartment, the strangers he passes once and the wife he sees every day — with the meticulous, unhurried technique of his forebears. His series Ma vie à Paris stages the everyday as a kind of quiet theatre, proving that realism, far from being a historical style, remains a living language for describing a life still being built.