Kirill Makarov

Biography

Kirill Makarov (b. 1988) is a multidisciplinary artist working between Paris and St. Petersburg, whose practice sits at the intersection of figurative painting, virtual reality, and game engines. He treats the digital not as a replacement for traditional technique but as an additional tool, a kind of virtual workbench where compositions combining oil painting, ultraviolet print, augmented reality, and video game logic are assembled and layered. His long exhibition history spans major Russian institutions including the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the State Tretyakov Gallery, MMOMA, and multiple editions of the Moscow Biennale, as well as international presentations such as the Russian Federation Pavilion's ArchiJam at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale and VR exhibitions with Ars Electronica. Across more than a decade of work, Makarov has consistently explored the boundary between physical and virtual space, memory and its digital transcription, and the shifting nature of the body and self under technological mediation. At Art Dubai Special Edition 2026, presented by Dom Art Projects alongside Sofya Skidan and Michiko Tsuda, Makarov showed VR pieces and NFT works where compositions move fluidly between virtual and physical environments, merging classical and digital visual languages into single surfaces where multiple planes of reality coexist.