Born in Moscow in 1962, graduated from The Moscow High Art and Industrial College (“Stroganovka”). Lives and works in Moscow.
- Exhibiting started in 1987. Participated in different group and one-man shows, international art festivals, biennial in Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara, Kemerovo), France (Paris), Switzerland (Basel), Dusseldorf (Germany), Italy, Denmark, Ukraine, The Czech Republic (Brno), Poland (Warsaw).
- Cooperation with Kemerovo Regional Museum of Fine Arts, Samara Regional Art Museum, Repin’s House-Museum, Moscow Institute of Modern Art, Zverev’s Center of Modern Art, Museum of Non-conformist Art in St. Petersburg, with Moscow galleries “Marat Gelman”, “Dar”, “Velta”, cultural center “Dom”, Moscow Center of Art, “Aidan”, “Palto” gallery, “Gallery Christine Colas, Estate Museum Bakhchisarai (Crimea, Ukraine), Center of Modern Art in Copenhagen (Denmark).
- Participation in various projects and publications of art catalogues.
- Works are in different collections in Russia and abroad.
Artist’s credo:
“Let us admit, that many people live automatically, and act under their own steam. While they don’t know themselves and don’t understand others. Down with functioning in society! Down with functioning in private relationships. Down with being robots! It is better to stand still than to act unconsciously and not knowing why. No one knows where this civilization moves us to, where the alive are convinced to be screws in a huge engine, our will is submitted to the rules. Let us grasp our own tail! Let us even see what we pretend for!”
Ignat Daniltsev represents a generation of artists who appeared on the Moscow stage at the end of 1980. That was the epoch of Perestroika not only in politics, but in revolutionary changes in mass consciousness, and also in the sphere of art, that was an attempt to make up for lost times during cultural isolation.
But Daniltsev wasn’t preoccupied with the fascinating game of different art languages – gradually he started to find his own theme. Perhaps the formation of his own creative orientation was effected by the acquaintance with the outstanding producer Andrey Tarkovsky – Ignat played the role of a boy in his film “The Mirror”.
Thus, a miniature gem that artist picked up off the ground at the Tishinsky flea market in Moscow became the catalyst for a series of actions and exhibitions. For several years the artist constructed thrilling scenery around a small handicraft chess figure of a nameless gulag prisoner, where this trifle started playing a magic role of an object, a symbol of a secret, of something innermost, that is in everybody’s soul. As a result the artist managed to create a capacious metaphor with which one can describe his own experiences and historic shocks of a large country.
Lately Ignat Daniltsev has turned to photo works. His photo series possess the same force of metaphor as the previous works. His new “robot mania” as a fresh personage in artist’s paintings looks some times naïve, sometimes metaphysically, at the same time a caricature, but all these robot depictions have always a symbolic content. This theme is very close to the artist’s heart: perpetual struggle of constrained mankind with archaisms and automation – the struggle between aestheticism and materialism, between substance and reality.
It is difficult to pigeonhole Daniltsev. Sometimes he acts as conceptualist and as the adherent of ready-made aesthetics, or astonishes public with handicrafts, or seems to be a follower of social art, or stand out as pure metaphysics. However, such a mixture of different ideological directions is a characteristic feature for modern Moscow art.
