ALEKSANDR BIRUK
MEET ALEKSANDR
Warsaw, Poland
Aleksandr Biruk is an artist from Minsk and currently lives in Warsaw, Poland.
He is greatly influenced by his higher education in Monumental Decorative Painting. His work centers on themes including the poetic experience of the individual in the world, connections with nature and the body. His paintings can be viewed through the prism of psychology and therapy; immersed in symbolism, archetypes and emotional states. These are related to themes of self-discovery, search for identity and inner conflicts.
In 2024, Aleksandr received the Gaude Polonia scholarship from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland.
His works are in private collections in the USA, Belarus, Germany, Thailand, UAE, Ukraine, Georgia.
Q+A
Grand Image:How did you get your start in art?
AB: I remember that even as a child it was very important to me that everything I did looked “beautiful” — aesthetically right. Color, form, harmony — all of that felt critically important to me from a very early age. I didn’t draw constantly as a kid, but this sensitivity to aesthetics eventually led me to art school, then college, and later the academy. And after graduating, I simply continued doing what I love most — painting.
Grand Image: How did you develop your style?
AB: I think my style grew out of my education, my environment, and the artists I admired throughout my life. It was a process of personal growth — deepening my thinking, broadening my visual culture, and spending years experimenting and studying the language of painting itself.
My training in monumental painting also influenced me a lot. It’s a form of painting connected to architecture, and it carries a very particular visual logic and ideology.
The way I understand the creative process shapes my work too — how I think painting functions, how I rationalize the process, and how much emotional and unconscious material I allow into it.
But overall, my style emerged simply through constant practice during periods of external change — moving between countries, going through personal and existential crises, and continuously searching for what genuinely feels alive and true to me.
Grand Image: Where are you from and how is that reflected in your work?
AB: I was born in Belarus, and I spent a lot of time in nature as a child because my parents moved to the countryside when I was very young. I think those early experiences of wandering through forests and landscapes — which always felt mysterious and almost mythical to me — became the foundation of the worldview I express in my work: its poetics, atmosphere, and mythology.
Later I moved many times and lived in different countries, and strangely that only strengthened my attachment to this inner landscape of nature.
The places from my childhood are inaccessible now — not only because you can never truly return to a place in time, since a “place” is also your own state of being within it. But I also can’t physically return for political reasons; it simply isn’t safe.
Because of that, the idea of a psychological landscape that I carry within myself has become central to my work — the inaccessibility of certain places on the inner map, and the search in every new place for echoes of that very first feeling.
Grand Image: How has your relationship with art changed the way you view the world?
AB: I think truly experiencing art requires two things.
First, you need to study a little — to understand some context. Nothing exists without context, and when a work is separated from it, part of its voice disappears. Art teaches humility and openness in that way.
Second, art constantly brings you back to yourself. At some point it forces you to ask: What do I actually feel about this? What is my own reaction? It teaches you to recognize your perceptions and emotions in a very nuanced way, and that brings you closer to reality.
These two approaches may seem contradictory at first — outward understanding and inward feeling — but to me they work together like two eyes, or two hands. Together they allow you to see the world more deeply, more widely, and maybe most importantly, to experience each moment more intensely.
Grand Image: What is inspiring you lately?
AB: Lately I travel a lot, and almost every trip leaves me with strange, almost mystical impressions. I try to spend as much time as possible in nature — forests, cliffs, caves, remote landscapes.
Sometimes the sheer scale and beauty of the world gives me these existential experiences that are difficult to fully explain. And very often it’s exactly those impressions that push me toward a new painting.
