Protey Temen

Protey Temen (born March 26, 1984, Moscow) is a contemporary artist, a multi-disciplinary media-artist whose works are often performed in the form of total installations, including graphics, video-art, sculpture, and painting.

He is a teacher at the Design School of the National research university the Higher School of Economics.

Born in Moscow (in the Tushino district), into a family of biological scientists, which is where he picked up his first impressions of the visual structure of scientific knowledge.

He became interested in drawing and graphic design as early as his school days, and upon leaving he began work as the art director of KULT, a Moscow music club.

He trained as an art director at the Humanitarian Institute of Television and Radio Broadcasting (2001-2002), and at the International Advertisement Institute (2003-2006).

In 2003 he became a member of the Zunge Design studio in Moscow, where he later became an art director.

In 2006 he became a member of The Tsekh (The Guild) world illustrators association.

The movement of Dobrotarism appeared in 2007, founded on the basis of the simplification of an image on a geometrical level, bright, contrasting colours and ostentatious joy.

The basic goal of the artist during this period was the study of the models and structures of daily life.

This resulted in the exhibition “Iconography of Dobrotarism”, held in the “Dom” (The House) cultural centre in 2007.

From 2008 to 2009, within his “Post-Dobrotarism” cycle, Protey delved even deeper into abstract imaging, still remaining within the confines of his initial graphic language.

''“My work is about ritual, about the soul, about a kind of pure thing.

And a number of symbols which I constantly used — masks, images, costumes — they are also about this pure thing.

A text and an emotional experience would stand behind each picture.

I came to this realisation just a short time ago, but it was true earlier too.

That same Dobrotarism is mixed up in religion, in the basics of Russian icon-painting.

In fact, I became drawn into the idea of identity.

And what does identity mean?

It is a system of signs and symbols”.''

Since 2009, Protey focused on multi-media art, working, in the fields of generative video, installation and performance which were new to him, in parallel with classical art practices.

In 2009 Temen, together with the artist Dima Kavko, founded the Gruppa Krovi art-association.

In 2010 the monochrome period of his work began, which featured a break from the full colour palette, beginning to describe the surrounding world via independent abstract systems.

Since 2011 he has been a member of the Moscow Union of Artists, a participant in the “Partnership of Placard Makers”, regional public organization.

He was a participant in the Venice Biennial 2011 (Internet pavilion), the European Biennial of Modern Art Manifesta 10, and the international biennial of digital art The Wrong.

The artist describes the surrounding world with the language of abstract graphics.

Since his early childhood, Protey has developed a particular, well-recognized style which he has realized in his work both as an art director or illustrator, and in his strictly personal work.

In 2012 he graduated from the Institute of Contemporary Art, from a course in “New Artistic Strategies”.

At the same time, together with other ICA graduates, he created an art group named GZKRKP (Glazun, Zhuravlev, Kiryusha, Ryumin, Kavko, Protey) and took part in group exhibitions as a member thereof.

As part of the process of forming his own aesthetic system and artistic language, in 2013 Protey began working with Oleg Stavitsky, a game developer, to create a series of mobile art applications, Bubl, which develop children’s fundamental habit patterns.

When developing interactive games designed for children aged from 1 to 6, Protey, as art director, was concerned with the development of perception of shape, colour and sound.

In a year, Fox & Sheep, a German mobile application publisher, announced their acquisition of Bubl Studio

At present, Protey Temen is a regular participant in art expositions, professional discussions and multi-format festivals in Australia, Brazil, South Korea, Russia, USA, Great Britain and continental Europe.

Temen defines his current art practice using two key terms: “abstract identity” and “routine spectacularity”.

Works by Protey Temen are held by the collections of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Russian State Library, Komnata (The Room) gallery, and in private collections in Russia, Germany, France and Spain.

By 2013 the final abandonment of colour and semi-tones occurred.

The approach that arose was also applied by Protey to alternative media: to sculpture, to video-shots, to 3D monochrome textures.

The basic theme of the period was the study of an object as a body, a line, a black spot: “The spot was one of the basic images which I used earlier; and even now it attracts me for many reasons: in one case it can disguise extra items in an image, concealing their essence; in another case it becomes a silhouette and almost a sign, it is both the shadow of a man and a hole in the universe”.

His first solo museum exhibition took place in 2014 in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in Petrovka Street.

In 2014, Protey formulated Surritualism as a new method.

It is based on two inseparable parts: ritual, and the principle of surrealism to denude the absurdity of this or that action.