Shaimardanov Alfrid

Exhibitions

2014 – I Pan-European Festival Marathon, Riga Congress House, Riga, Latvia
2014 – Eurasian Festival of Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg
2013 - group exhibition, IV Moscow International Festival of Naive Art
2004 - International Caricature Biennale, Santa Cruz, Spain
1996 - personal exhibition, Renaissance Gallery, Kazan
1993 - group exhibition, All-Russian exhibition "Naive Art of Russia", Moscow

Alfrid Shaimardanov (born in 1961) is an artist whose works are in private collections, as well as in the Museum of Naive Art, the Museum of Organic Culture, the Evgeny Roizman Museum of Naive Art, the National Cultural Center «Kazan», collection of Boris Messerer.

He studied at the Leningrad Institute of Film Engineers as a mechanical engineer, worked at the Kazan newsreel studio as an assistant cameraman. Since 1988 lives in Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan. Since 1993 he has been professionally engaged in painting and from the same year begins to exhibit.

Alfrid Shaimardanov has a pronounced creative style. The artist created his own mythology, which is very specific, since it is created by a person who has sprouted roots in the urban, “educated” soil, and therefore behind the naivety of forms in his paintings is the crafty philosophy of a city dweller who has absorbed a lot of surrounding information. His works are made up of "high forms and genres" that have turned into naive art, and form a touching and original world filled with multi-layered symbolism, which is revealed to the attentive viewer over and over again. The phantasmagoria of what is happening in the paintings is akin to the postmodern absurdity of today's reality and is akin to the clip aesthetics of contemporary art. The artist's works invariably find the warmest response from the viewer, who has largely forgotten when a contemporary artist communicates with him so warmly, confidentially and meaningfully.