Rus Kitchin
Rus is a Melbourne based artist that predominantly works in the painting, digital and video realms. Recently graduating from the VCA with a Bachelor in Fine Art; Majoring in Painting, Rus has combined his involvement in the 80’s in Melbourne’s graffiti sub-culture, with his current training in a more traditional medium.
Known as AIM; Art In Motion in the 80’s, Rus’s bombings and trade pieces on the streets of Melbourne, saw the advent of a more surrealist and Fine Art style resonating through his work, even then. His introduction to the graffiti sub-culture changed his materiality, artistic process and his aesthetical choices began to evolve, adopting aspects of the styles inherent in this new contemporary art movement.
In 1990, Rus exhibited in Australia’s first National Touring Aerosol Art Exhibition, ‘Pump up the Can’, and in 1992 painted a mural/installation at the first Graffiti Exhibition ‘Off the Wall,’ at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Travelling and living in the United States, Central America, Mexico, Canada, Egypt, India and Europe has evidently informed and inspired his current artistic sensibilities and imagery in his work today. His works draw from personal experiences, ideas and interests that are sourced from a world that is as fragile, as it is re-enforced; as profane, as it is sacred; as ugly, as it is beautiful; and as real, as it is seemingly hyper-real or digital.
The love of, and influence from, a few active years spent as a graffiti artist, Rus’s ongoing fascination with various ancient cultures, and more formal aspects pertaining to the consideration of Contemporary Fine Art; intersect to lay down the conceptual framework of his practice.
Rus aims to create a series of conundrums within his paintings; an act of counter cultural, culture jamming. Deliberate contradiction via visual juxtapositions of time and place, juxtapositions of mediums, and the impermanence of paper permanently protected under veneers of resin, all illustrate this. To view these works straight on, or from a distance is not dissimilar from walking through life, seeing the world merely as a series of frozen backdrops. But to get in close, to move along these works, is to see them how they are, multilayered and textural; inhabited by drips and splutters that are part spontaneity and part control.
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