Millennial artist Sayan Baigaliyev is a rising star on Kazakhstan's art scene. He transforms intimate domestic spaces into profound meditations on home, reality, and existential vulnerability through his innovative painting-sculpture hybrids and emotionally charged interiors.

Sayan Baigaliyev (b. 1996) is today considered to be one of the most promising young artists from Central Asia. After a decade living and working in Moscow, last year made an emotional homecoming to his native country and he was included in Kazakhstan's ‘Forbes 30 Under 30’ list. His work has been shown at numerous international art exhibitions and fairs and in 2021, Baigaliyev won the Jackson’s Art Prize (UK), and last year he became a finalist for the Arte Laguna Prize, participating in the collateral program of the Venice Biennale.

Baigaliyev was born in the village of Betkuduk in eastern Kazakhstan and he began studying the art of painting in the nearby city of Ust-Kamenogorsk, later as a teenager he continued his education at a boarding school and college affiliated with the Zhurgenov Academy of Arts in Almaty. His mentor was Gulnaziya Kasteyeva, the youngest daughter of Abylkhan Kasteyev (1904-1973), Kazakhstan’s foremost classical painter. Being separated from his home and family at an early age had a significant impact on Baigaliyev’s work and the theme of home and one’s personal space became central to his artistic practice.

In 2016, Baigaliyev moved to Moscow to study at the Surikov Institute, and at the time he confesses that he had little knowledge of art history and mostly held strict academic views about art. His primary goal was to master the ‘basics’, which he later came to reject. In his third year, he began to search for what he called ‘more freedom’ with the realization that “painting can not be what it used to be” as he put it. Baigaliyev transferred to the studio of Aidan Salahova (b. 1964), known for working in a contemporary artistic context although Baigaliyev had no intention of abandoning painting as a medium. For him painting is the optimal form for “deep viewer immersion into the work”. In 2022 he began creating volumetric paintings, works at the intersection of painting, installation, and sculpture. Talking about his 2022 graduation project ‘From the Room’ — one of his first volumetric paintings — he says that it “was partly inspired by the work of Robert Rauschenberg”. Baigaliyev has never totally abandoned imagery of the visible world, but he was influenced by abstract painting, especially that of Kazuo Shiraga (1924-2008) who is among his favorite artists. In 2023, he participated in the ninth season of Winzavod Open Studios where he created one of his best-known works, a painterly installation called ‘Inside the Space I Live In’.

In December 2024, the Kasteyev Museum in Almaty staged a solo exhibition of Baigaliyev’s work called ‘Matte(r)reality’, which was a significant event in the art scene of the capital. The show was curated around a conceptual narrative mainly about the fear of death and the loss of a sense of reality in today’s hyper-informational, conflict-ridden world which reflected the artist’s main preoccupations over the past six years. It showed how the artist has matured with a consistency of vision and depth of meaning and expression throughout his work which seems playful or even entertaining, but in reality there is tragedy and always a philosophical dimension.

Baigaliyev’s paintings predominantly consist of still lifes and interiors which almost always depict the artist’s own apartment. Although the painter represents a confined space, he often strives to expand it. This tendency is already visible in relatively early works such as ‘Waiting for Jean’ (2020) and ‘Four Rooms’ (2021). The apartment is often depicted from the corridor, allowing the viewer to peek into each room, or the space is opened up through mirrors. When a window appears, it usually reveals a panoramic view. Baigaliyev often combines multiple viewpoints within a single composition, enabling him to depict what is normally impossible to see from just one perspective. He is interested in a kind of “super-vision” an expanded perception that is even reflected in the elongated formats of his canvases.

Another important element is an abundance of expressively distorted objects – a form of creative chaos. These objects populate the space and seem to transform into independent living entities that establish the ‘lifeworld’ of the place and domesticate a rented apartment. In everyday life, such objects quickly fade from attention, slipping into a kind of blind spot. But Baigaliyev ‘switches off’ this habitual way of seeing and reintroduces them into the field of perception. His home, while a protected, personal space, simultaneously becomes a field of inquiry, and the confined space transforms into something boundless and ultimately unknowable – making it truly real and alive.

The interiors from 2023–2024 differ significantly from earlier works. The paintings have become more expressive and intense with sharper lines and angles. The spaces are cut through by stark contrasts of light and shadow. Bright and warm colours almost completely disappear from the palette, which is reduced to black, white, and grey. Red appears occasionally, but only to heighten the viewer’s sense of anxiety. The focus shifts to emptiness as in the canvas ‘No One in the Hallway’ (2023), where the few objects you see represent the state of loneliness. In ‘Between the Floors’ (2024) and ‘At the End of the Hallway’ (2024), there is a table, a single stool, and one cup.

Sometimes the space itself becomes purely symbolic, resembling Escher-like graphics and leaning toward geometric abstraction. The apartment takes on a cosmic dimension, its unknowability no longer inviting exploration, but instead reminding us of death. Anything alive is inevitably vulnerable, and the lifeworld of the apartment is no exception. The motif of death anxiety runs through much of Baigaliyev’s work, as in the sculptural-painting still life ‘In Half’ (2023), which could well be considered a “quintessential genre piece.”

Baigaliyev compares his interiors to self-portraits and likens the transformation of his style to the political upheavals of recent years. He accurately depicts the collapse of warm and complex personal “lifeworlds.” It is not just about those directly affected by global events, but also those living in the psychological climate they create. Fear, anxiety, and a heightened sense of vulnerability compel individuals to seek safety — but even that refuge proves permeable. His 2023–2024 interiors depict the psychological destruction of everyday environmenst, built from layers of individual experience and trauma. These interiors tell a story about the fragility and complexity of living beings, who are subjected to violent “simplification” – reduced to abstract units and subordinated to inhuman ideological frameworks. Such simplification is directly tied to a loss of a sense of reality. In this context, Baigaliyev’s earlier interiors – and the loving gaze of the artist-researcher toward them ­­– take on new meaning.

This shift is also evident in his painting-sculpture works such as ‘From the Room’ (2022) and ‘Inside the Space I Live in’ (2023). These objects seem to have broken free from the canvas, appearing both dynamic and unstable. They are like newborn babies just entering the world. A table, a chair, a stool, glasses, an easel – all are deliberately asymmetrical, their crookedness giving them individuality. The painterly expression transforms into the movement of thing-creatures. The dense texture becomes their flesh, saturated with the juice of life. Baigaliyev’s painterly installations and sculptures are a symbolic attempt to resist the flattening of abstraction and restore a sense of reality – one where curiosity, attentiveness, care, and the value of life still have a place. All these subtle elements are often incompatible with times of historical upheaval.