Akhmat Bikanov, 1996, Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, Russia
Informed by his upbringing in the North Caucasus, Akhmat Bikanov creates portraits and tableaux that evoke notions of communion and estrangement. Through his dreamlike paintings and drawings, he carefully crafts a timeless, silent world, imbued with empathy and inhabited by kindred souls. The serendipitous nature of watercolour enables Biikanov to capture their elusive emotions. Also working with ceramics, his porcelain bas-reliefs are exhibited here for the first time. In Bikanov’s distinct style, one can discern discreet references to his Balkar heritage, as well as to Fayoum portraits, Persian miniatures, and Byzantine mosaics. Symbols of personal significance, such as figs, pomegranates, and cypress trees recur throughout the paintings, alongside the portraits that capture the essence of the people he loves. The silent characters daydream or exchange gazes full of empathy while secluded in a solitude that transcends words.
Akhmat Bikanov, an artist and architect originally from Nalchik, in the North Caucasus. He spent his formative years immersed in the landscape of Kabardino-Balkaria, and that sense of nature, home, and memory remains tightly bound to his practice.
Akhmat studied at the Moscow Art Institute, graduating in 2020, then continued to work between Moscow and his native Nalchik and later moving to Berlin in 2023 His art draws from a deeply personal relationship with nature and memory. In interviews, he has described returning to mountain gorges, rivers, and wild spaces as therapeutic—spaces where contradictions dissolve and clarity returns. He often collects objects, stones, handcrafted items from home as anchors to place and identity, weaving them into his internal narrative.
Akhmat’s visual language leans toward the poetic and introspective: his watercolors and mixed works evoke stillness, reverie, and subtle emotional tension. He resists bold declarations or overt spectacle; instead, his art speaks through gentle atmospheres, evoking memory and longing.
Akhmat works primarily with watercolour, in which he appreciates the ability to see the errors behind the layers of translucent solution that allow the colour to become more expressive. However, this process requires time for each previous layer to dry before applying the next. For the artist, his practice is above all a ritual, where it is important not to be afraid and to appreciate mistakes, to learn to release control and accept the mismatch between the original idea and the eventual realisation.
Field trips with his family or his mother’s colleagues, members of the National Dance and Music Ensemble; moments of rest surrounded by mountains and more often solitary portraits — all these are patterns of elusive memories of the past turned into fantasies of the future. The artist’s working method reflects the properties of human memory in many ways: preparatory graphic sketches are more precise than watercolours, where details give way to colour solutions that convey a whole image. What the artist remembers blurs with the passage of time, leaving plumes of sensations from the experience and forming images of memory.
The space of Bikanov’s works, although reminiscent of the Caucasus, at the same time becomes a fictional landscape of a place where people are united by common values. It is a shelter in which there is no judgement or coercion, a place free from all that is superficial and biassed, where everyone is able to be themselves in the company of loved ones and family, where there is intimacy but at the same time there is a room for detachment and solitude. Akhmat creates a space of personal mythology that can embrace his own memories, transformed while seeking and building up a world where there is a place of peace and freedom.