Main image: Igor Gusev (Facebook)
The twenty-second interview through images by Andrew Sheptunov
War changes everyone’s optics, but when artists join the ranks, the very fabric of culture shifts. We continue our special column, You in the Army Now, dedicated to art figures who have exchanged the comfort of galleries for army life. Our next hero is a figure who is iconic, if not monumental, to the Ukrainian art scene.
Igor Gusev. For Odessa, this name has long been synonymous with contemporary art. Igor is the DNA of modern Odessa. Born here in November 1970 and trained in the classical school of the renowned Odessa Art College, he burst into the art world during the turbulent 90s, becoming one of the brightest representatives of the "New Wave."
Heir to the traditions of the South Russian wave and Odessa nonconformism, he has always stood apart, virtuously balancing painting, performance, and poetry. Gusev is an institution unto himself: founder of the legendary "Norma" apartment gallery, ideologue of the "Art Raiders" movement (which turned the Starokonny flea market into an exhibition space), and an artist whose "glitches" on classical subjects predicted the fracture of our reality long before it physically occurred.
Behind him lie dozens of exhibitions from Kyiv to European capitals and participation in landmark projects, including the First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art (Arsenale 2012).
His art has always been built on subtle, purely Odessan irony and the deconstruction of pathos. He "hacked" antique portraits with colored stripes, mixing the aesthetics of Rococo with the aesthetics of error, creating visual paradoxes that made the viewer smile and feel anxious simultaneously.
But today, paradoxes have become part of his life. Gusev, who spent his life exploring the absurdity of existence, has found himself inside its harshest form—war. Now he wears "pixel" camouflage instead of a fashionable scarf, and his call sign is—predictably and accurately—"Artist."
His series of drawings in a diary titled World War III, made on the covers of old books or stray sheets of paper in 2025, has become one of the most piercing diaries of this war.
Speaking about war with words is difficult—they often seem either insufficient or overly pathetic. Speaking with an artist who is inside the war is doubly difficult. Therefore, we decided to abandon the traditional long-read with text answers.
We proposed a game to Igor Gusev in which he is a grandmaster. We asked 12 questions—about fear, hope, culture, and the future—and he answered them in the way he knows best: with his work.
This is a visual interview. The questions are asked by the editors; the answers are by Igor Gusev.
1. Your internal barometer: what is the pressure in society’s atmosphere right now?
2. A visual formula for "high-precision love" during wartime.
3. The ideal camouflage for an artist in a reality full of absurdity.
4. A visualization of that very moment when “everything went wrong”.
5. What would a dialogue between the last century and the present day look like if they had a quarrel?
6. Your personal pill for anxiety.
7. The landscape a person sees when closing their eyes during an air raid alert.
8. If Odessa were a person, what mood did she wake up in today?
9. The border where the funny stops being funny and becomes scary.
10. A thing that refuses to obey the laws of physics on your canvases.
11. What does nostalgia look like after being put through a shredder?
12. A painting you would send into space as a message to aliens about humanity in the 2020s
This wordless dialogue says more about our time than hundreds of news reports. From the ironic "Trumposaurs" to the piercing message to aliens via the image of Amy Winehouse, Igor Gusev continues to document the era, even as it tries to destroy him.
His work today is not just art; it is an act of resistance against entropy. The call sign "Artist" is one hundred percent justified: even in the trenches, where reality is rough and material, Gusev finds space for metaphysics and a "high-precision love" for life. The glitch, which used to be just a technique on his canvases, has now become the state of the world, but Igor, as an experienced operator of reality, continues to turn this failure into meaning.
We don't know what Igor Gusev’s next "answer" will be, but we know for sure that it will be honest.
Follow the artist’s visual diary, his new sketches on book covers, and chronicles of his service on Instagram and Facebook.
View the full archive of his projects, actions, and painting series on his official website.
