Ilya Bliznets (Russian, b. 1997) practices figurative painting combined with AI-assisted digital techniques, working with traditional materials alongside graphic editors to create introspective, painterly digital images.,He treats AI-generated images as a starting point, developing them further in Photoshop with brushes, filters and layers to preserve a sense of materiality within the digital space. His work centers on inner states such as vulnerability, anxiety and emptiness.
He enrolled at a polytechnic university in the Department of Roads and Airfields in 2016, but interrupted his studies the following year after developing an interest in contemporary art and painting.From 2017 to 2018 he was part of Cosi o cosa, a three-artist group that made collaborative paintings and held two solo exhibitions in Ivanovo and Moscow.,He began exhibiting digital work in group shows in 2022.
In 2023 his painting Sketches in the forest appeared in “E-motions” at Unit London, a show curated by Claire Silver that explored AI-assisted art through the lens of the Japanese hikikomori phenomenon of social withdrawal. The painting combines figuration and abstraction to explore the boundary between the real and the imagined.Other AI-assisted paintings from the same year have been described as addressing identity, socialization, societal issues and self-reflection.
His series Discrete forms works with dithering, a texture he uses to convey the state of the digital image. The figure in these paintings is never fixed, appearing instead in a continuous process of reassembly that can be read as a person, a state, or the act of perception itself.In 2026 his work was included in “Still Wet”, an eighteen-artist group show at Galerie Met in Berlin curated by Kika Nicolela and Ruizhe Liang in collaboration with objkt.com.,
