Karen Stepanyants is a Moscow born artist, graphic designer, educator, and musician whose practice brings together precision, imagination, and curiosity. Born in 1950 into an artistic family, he first trained as a cellist at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory before later studying graphic design and art education at the Leningrad Higher School of Art and Industry named after V. I. Mukhina, now the Stieglitz Academy in St Petersburg.
His musical background gives his visual work a distinctive sense of rhythm. His compositions often feel carefully orchestrated, with line, gesture, colour, and empty space working together like parts of a score. Moving between abstraction and figuration, he has worked across painting, graphics, ceramics, installation, and art objects.
He is a member of the Moscow Union of Artists and the Union of Russian Artists, and has taught drawing, painting, and contemporary graphic practice in Moscow. In 2010, he founded the creative group O YA, developing experimental projects that included performances, installations, and art objects.
His works are held in significant Russian collections, including the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Museum of Oriental Art, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art. His exhibition history includes presentations in Moscow, St Petersburg, Rome, Bonn, Heidelberg, Munich, Hamburg, Oldenburg, and Riga.
The work presented in this exhibition, The Animal Alphabet, reveals Stepanyants’ fascination with hybrid forms, invented systems, and the meeting point between science, humour, andfantasy. Arranged like an eccentric zoological archive, the composition presents strange creatures within delicate frames of notes, symbols, numbers, and handwritten marks.Insects, fish, birds, and animal like beings appear both familiar and impossible, transforming the alphabet into a playful visual universe where language, observation, and imagination overlap.
Stepanyants’ art rewards close looking. His finely tuned lines and unexpected forms create a world where knowledge becomes poetic and drawing becomes an act of discovery.