The Irbit Museum of Fine Arts houses the canvas “Academic Still Life” by Kirill Sergeyevich Borodin. Borodin’s work is distinguished by a highly personal visual language that masterfully synthesizes abstraction and realism. Employing expressive brushstrokes and a vibrant color palette, he explores a broad range of subjects — including portraiture, landscape, genre scenes, and still life.
Still life, as a genre of fine art, is dedicated to the arrangement and depiction of everyday objects within a cohesive composition. Far more than mere representation, it serves as a profound vehicle for exploring plasticity, chromatic harmony, and the artist’s individual aesthetic philosophy. In Borodin’s hands, objects are not merely observed — they interact, converse, and embody the artist’s interpretation of reality.
In “Academic Still Life”, Borodin presents a minimalist yet evocative arrangement: a faceted glass stands adjacent to a draped white cloth, upon which rest two fish, three pieces of bread, and half a lemon. This composition invites comparison with the still lifes of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin from the 1920s–1930s — a period in which humble, even austere, domestic items became potent symbols of post-revolutionary Russian life. Herring, for instance, was a recurring motif in Petrov-Vodkin’s work during those years; likewise, the lemon — a staple of 17th-century Dutch still lifes — appears frequently in his canvases, as does the faceted glass. Yet Borodin’s interpretation diverges subtly yet significantly. His glass is cylindrical in form — lacking the traditional upward flare, with wide, flat edges and no smooth rim.
This variation is not arbitrary. The classic Soviet-style faceted glass, with its 16–17 facets and beveled edge, was not yet in circulation during Petrov-Vodkin’s time. Though rudimentary faceted vessels were produced under Peter the Great (their angular design proving practical for use aboard ships), the now-iconic model — durable, stackable, and resistant to breakage even when dropped from a meter’s height — was first manufactured in 1943 at the Gus-Khrustalny Glass Factory. Designed for mass use in Soviet canteens, cafeterias, and railway cars, this glass became a ubiquitous symbol of everyday life in the USSR — and remains in production today.
Born in 1987 in Kurgan, Kirill Borodin graduated from the Department of Scenic Painting at the Ivan Shadr Yekaterinburg Art College in 2008; he earned a degree in Easel Painting from the Ural State Academy of Architecture and Art in 2014. Already in 2015, he was admitted to the Russian Union of Artists and the UNESCO International Association of Fine Arts (AIAP). Today, Borodin lives and works in Yekaterinburg.
