That’s me.

Bio.

Painter Phil Rabovsky (b. 1987) was born in Moscow and grew up in rust belt Upstate New York. He received his BA in art and philosophy from Columbia University in 2009 and his MFA in Art Practice from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in 2018. He is a member of the faculty at SVA’s MFA in Art Practice, where he leads second and third-year seminars. He has previously been a visiting artist at the school’s BFA program. Phil is a member of Shoestring Press in Brooklyn, where he participated in two-person shows with master printer Lane Sell. His first solo show, Venticento, opened at Van Der Plas Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 2018. He has been an artist-in-residence at The Studios at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA, and a summer workshop participant at the studio of Enrique Martínez Celaya in Los Angeles. His work has been written about in Brooklyn Magazine and Steve Cannon’s A Gathering of the Tribes. In 2019, he launched the podcast Capital A: Unauthorized Opinions on Money, Art, and Everything. Set adrift by the Soviet apocalypse, he has lived on three continents and speaks English, Russian, Hungarian and Spanish. He currently resides in New York City.

Statement.

History is important to me. I mine it for perspectives on the present and keys to the future.

I think of my recent work as contemporary cave painting. In it, I make my own paints by hand and use them to create fairly direct representations of the figures that populate the world I am aware of. These range from scavengers like the turkey vultures I have seen overhead from New York State to South America, to legendary beings like the Sasquatch, to the lumbering monstrosities of the military-industrial complex. Painting in this way is a kind of return for me. As I engage in it, I wonder: if we had it to do over again, would history come out right a second time?