Anatol Stepanenko

Anatol Stepanenko (1948) is a Ukrainian postmodern artist. He worked in performance, film directing, and conceptual photography and founded the cyberpunk style in Ukrainian painting. In his art, the critical transformations of the consciousness of Ukrainians from the mid-1970s to today are reproduced. Since 1987, the works of Anatoly Stepanenko have been exhibited at exhibitions in Toronto and the annual International Exhibition of Miniatures in Poland. In 2001, the artist took part in the Venice Biennale. Personal exhibitions of the artist were held in Kyiv, Basel, Trier, Zurich, Tbilisi, and Krakow, and he also implemented other projects in New York, Canada, and Hungary.

Contemporaries call Anatoly Stepanenko an «artist beyond taboos». His project "Transmutations" combines conceptual photography, body art actions, and performance. One of the motives that formed the basis of this series was the Chornobyl tragedy. The painted body of the mannequin is reminiscent of archaic ritual practices that invoke human fear. Reflections on human mutations after the nuclear disaster and trends of transspecies mutations due to technological progress were the most progressive discourse of the late 1990s. That is why this series of photo installations by Stepanenko represented Ukrainian art at the Venice Biennale.