Sergei Balenok

He works in book and easel drawing (mainly in etchings), easel paintings. His compositions decorated books of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Sheckley, Kurt Vonnegut. Except for the decoration of the publications of Jules Verne, he does not work on commissions. According to the artist, art should not banal reproduce the world, its task is to create new worlds. He is successful in depicting emotions, moods, sensations, feelings of any normal human being. His works are showcased in the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus, the Museum of Contemporary Fine Art (Minsk), the graphic museum of Winterthur (Switzerland), the art museums of the cities: Polotsk (Belarus), New Brunswick (USA), Rimini (Italy), Kraków (Poland), Győr (Hungary), Eindhoven (Netherlands), Munich (Germany), as well as in private Belarusian (Alexandr Ivanov) and foreign collections.

Works of the artist “capture attention with both high aesthetics and slight irony of usual but seen in the unusual perspective images”, the newspaper Novy Chas invited to visit the artist’s exhibition in 2017. “Balenok's works are distinctive of philosophizing, and despite the „black and white“ style, filled with the bright light of experience, deep reflections of the artist,” the radio station Belaruskaje Radyjo Razyja transmitted impressions from the artist’s exhibition in the Polotsk Art Gallery in 2016. Alisa Mikhailova in the reportage on the Belarus-1 channel from a regular Balenok's exhibition stressed that the features of abstraction, surrealism, and realism are organically put on display in the artist’s works. Art critic Larisa Finkel’steyn in 2014 identified paintings of the artist as “very unexpected and lyrical, in which there is a free movement of color.” At the opening of the solo exhibition dedicated to the 60th anniversary of engraver, Belarusian art historian Natalla Sharangovich praised him with the words, “This is really a fine artist. I have been familiar with his oeuvre for many years, and he is always unpredictable for me.” “The author has a rare quality for a modern creator – the ability to surprise,” Kamila Januškievič assessed the work on the pages of the magazine “Mastactva” following the results of the artist’s exhibition in 2014. Andrey Adamovich observed notes of the Apocalypse in the works of Sergei Balenok. Art critic Alesya Romanyuk called his works as “the most somber ones among all seen, as they show a rotten parallel world, in whose existence you don’t want to believe, even if it is the fruit of the author’s imagination.”

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