From Soviet-era whitewashing to contemporary meditations on censorship and memory, Russian artists have long worked in layers - literally and metaphorically. This survey explores how palimpsest as an artistic strategy can cut across generations, materials, and meanings.

Last winter, Moscow gallery Set Projects presented ‘I Look at You (and See Everyone)’, a solo exhibition by Yana Serobabina (b. 2004), an artist from Omsk now based in Nizhny Novgorod. Most of the works consisted of sheets of rice paper layered over drawings and collages, allowing words and images beneath to emerge with varying degrees of clarity. The fragmented phrases in these underlying layers remain only partially legible, creating an atmosphere that is both enigmatic and unsettling. This effect is reinforced by Serobabina’s distinctive visual language, which Afisha magazine has described as “blurred and hazy.” Exploring themes of fragility, self-censorship, withdrawal, and the (im)possibility of being heard, the project is particularly well suited to this layered mode of presentation. Yet while Serobabina employs the technique to powerful effect, she is far from alone. Many contemporary Russian artists have adopted similar strategies of layering and concealment, although their motivations and artistic objectives vary considerably.

Perhaps the most obvious artist one thinks of when it comes to layering is Vladimir Potapov (b. 1980), a native of Volgograd who has long been based in Moscow. In 2015 he began the series ‘Inside,’ using a technique which involves scraping away layers of paint. The idea behind it came to him from a detail of everyday life familiar to anyone who has lived in Russia. The structures in children’s playgrounds are regularly repainted without the previous layers being stripped away and over time a very thick crust accumulates, comparable to the annual rings of a tree. This opens up the possibility of a peculiar form of archaeology. Each of Potapov’s works tells the story of the past breaking through into the present; they are firmly rooted in questions of memory. The artist himself maintains that the historical dimension grew out of the method of layering and then fracturing images, rather than the other way round.

A recent project by Potapov, ‘Adzhеrоm. Type: Settlement. Status: Residential’ (2024), shown at the Zverevsky Centre for Liberal Arts in Moscow, was dedicated to what appears on the surface to be an ordinary village in the Komi Republic. During the Stalin era, Adzhеrоm was a forced labour camp complete with watchtowers and barbed wire. Today, people live in the former barracks, administrative buildings, and other prison structures. Some of the residents are descendants of both prisoners and guards who have stayed there since the 1950s. Naturally, under such circumstances, the inhabitants tend to push the settlement’s prison-era past out of the public domain, although this proves rather difficult in practice: the entire surrounding forest is one vast cemetery of those who perished in the repressions, with memorial plaques and crosses scattered haphazardly throughout. Potapov has painted several pictures of these dual-purpose buildings in the settlement, covering them with wallpaper, and then tearing it away so that the underlying image is partially revealed.

Something similar occurs in the work of Slava Nesterov (b. 1989), an artist from Perm now living in Moscow. His pieces are always multi-layered and compositionally complex. He deliberately combines different materials – such as wood, metal, canvas, paper, epoxy resin and dried plants – each of which corresponds to its own imagery and technique of mark-making. Frequently, one material is layered over another. The result is that Nesterov’s objects – typically panels – come to resemble a kind of archaeological excavation. Valery Chtak (1981–2024) worked in a similar vein, albeit with a more limited range of materials; indeed, he explicitly referred to one period of his practice as “layerism.”

Young artist Sasha Kupriyanov (b. 1999), originally from the Penza region, has lived and worked in Moscow for the past several years. His exhibition ‘The Most Normal Person in the World’ has been recently shown at the Szena gallery in Moscow. Some of the works are canvases onto which a “filter” has been applied – a particular, more or less uniform tint laid over the image. Numbers have also been added on the surface of the painting. In one instance, Kupriyanov takes the canonical work ‘Las Meninas’ (1656) by Diego Velázquez and covers it with such filters. The artist’s reflections and experiments are rooted in questions of post-production, image editing, and the general mediatisation of contemporary life: after all, we do not perceive things directly but through devices, with the barely perceptible intervention of algorithms. The digital representation of reality renders the world so thoroughly layered that one can easily lose one's way within it.

Ilya (1933–2023) and Emilia (b. 1945) Kabakov also made active use of layers – though in their case these were primarily conceptual rather than formal which is in any case a characteristically Conceptualist strategy. Their project ‘Colouring Book’ (2011), for instance, is styled after recognisable book illustrations – little rabbits with carrots, flowers, mushrooms and ships – and yet through this charming imagery a profane phrase shows through.

There are many examples of artists across different generations who find images on an existing support, and attracted or captivated by the found image, they then add their own layer – which functions as commentary and appropriation. Zuhra Salakhova (b. 1997), an artist from Kazan uses ready-made garments as a starting point, onto which she adds embroidery, appliqué, painted elements, or other additions. As the layers accumulate, the textile objects are transformed beyond recognition.

Moscow artist Vitaly Bezpalov (b. 1985) staged a solo exhibition ‘EVIL VITALY’ in 2025 at the Moscow art space Gaelary. The central conceit of his project was the hypothetical supposition that Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was really killed by Valerie Solanas, that Pop Art is well and truly dead, yet that despite this the strategy of mass reproduction has conquered the entire world. Among Bezpalov’s works was a garish lenticular photograph of Moskva-City – an architecturally controversial cluster of office and residential towers in Moscow – over which the artist added a new layer – an image of a skull with the title of the exhibition.

One might also recall here some curious episodes from Russian art history: Soviet artists often repainted canvases in response to shifting political realities, and occasionally the results bordered on the farcical. About ten years ago, the State Historical Museum in Moscow staged a large-scale retrospective to mark the 135th anniversary of Alexander Gerasimov (1881–1963), a major figure in the official Stalinist style. Amongst other things, the exhibition featured one version of his most iconic painting ‘J. V. Stalin and K. E. Voroshilov in the Kremlin’ (1938), popularly known as ‘Two Leaders After the Rain’. This meme-worthy work was displayed in a version that verged on the outright absurd. Following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism, Gerasimov had painted over an unfinished replica of the picture with an entirely different composition showing cows grazing in a field: ‘Collective Farm Herd’ (1959). For the 2016 retrospective, part of the canvas was cleaned to reveal both layers simultaneously: Stalin and military commander Voroshilov appeared alongside cows and milkmaids on bicycles. This hybrid canvas was subsequently shown at several further exhibitions, where it came to be received as a piece of naive Sots Art.

The strategy of creating palimpsests turns out to be extraordinarily productive. It allows artistic works to acquire remarkable depth by relatively straightforward means, plunging the viewer abruptly into a captivating story. One can dig so deep that getting back out again takes quite some effort.