Arkadiy Nasonov is linked to the circle of Medical Hermeneutics group, founded by Pavel Pepperstein in the late 1980s. Nasonov’s work perfectly matches the term “psychedelic realism”, it is filled with conceptual hallucinations and esoteric associations.
Nasonov is most known as founder of an art group “Cloud Commission” (created in 1991 together with D Ligeiros, Т. Detkina and others). As Daria Kurdyukova explains, “The commissioners who joined were given the Cloud Commission forms […] The paperwork of all sorts of offices and commissions was interpreted sarcastically in Nasonov’s form sheets – neat pictures were supplemented with industriously drawn comments that preserved the flavor of the Soviet officialdom language but were reduced to absurdity, being turned into some schizophrenic flow of words.”
In 1995 Arkadiy Nasonov with S. Anufriev and A. Sobolev founded TARTU – poetry society that positioned its poetic experiences in the tradition of Russian school of linguistic structuralism. Nasonov is also an author of a project Gallery of a Single Visitor.
Arkadiy Nasonov was born in 1969 in Sverdlovsk (now Ekatherinburg), Russia. Now he lives and works in Moscow. He graduated from Moscow Academical Theatre Institute (stage design) in 1991.
His work has been presented in several solo shows: at the State Institute of Art Studies in Moscow (2015), Freud dreams museum in Saint-Petersburg (2013, 2003), Zverev Center of contemporary art (2011), State Tretyakov gallery with S. Anufriev (2005). Nasonov also took part in numerous group shows such as at Moscow Museum (2021), PERA Museum in Istanbul (2017), National Center of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2014), Garage MCA in Moscow (2010). Works of Arkadiy Nasonov can be found in collections of Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Holland, in Deutschebank collection in Berlin. Arkadiy Nasonov had grants and fellowships such as Grant of Dutch Instute in Rome in 2000, fellowships of La Napoule Art Foundation in 2002, Kunstlerhaus (Worpswede) in 2003.