Olekszij Szaj

(Kijev / Kyiv, 1975 – )

Lives and works in Kyiv. Graduated from the Kyiv Art and Industrial Technical School, the Department of Graphic Design, and the Ukrainian Academy of Art and Architecture, the Department of Easel Graphics. At the beginning of the 2000s, the artist worked as an art director in a row of leading ad agencies of Kyiv. The scheduled lifestyle of the office worker pushed him to search his own visual language which would be adequate to this particular mode of being. In the middle of the 2000s, the artist founded his original method of creating images – he began to “draw pictures” in Microsoft Office Excel. This technique, where each fragment of an image is actually a mathematical formula, becomes the basis for the long-lasting Excel Art project. Subsequently, the artist begins to use the elements of the office life in his installations. The “small” office man with her almost invisible life dramas that emerge in the area between the printer and the coffee machine has been the main character of the artist’s works for more than a decade. The works of Oleksiy Sai are incorporated into the collections of the auction house of Phillips de Pury, ArtCurial and private collections in Western and Eastern Europe.

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