Nerikh Nikita b. 2004, lives and works in moscow

Nikita Nerikh works under the name rikhner. He came to contemporary art through comics — he studied them at the HSE Art and Design School, where he learned to tell stories in pictures, and is now continuing with an MA in Contemporary Art. Stories remained at the heart of everything he does, but the form has changed: today he makes artist’s books, videos, paintings and installations. All of them are about the same thing — home, family, the body, and the quiet unease hiding inside ordinary days. Among his works are the artist’s book Sometimes She Took a Piece of Paper and Tore It into Small Pieces (2025), the videos Silence in Two Rooms (2025) and No-cry (2026), and the installation The Low Pass (2026). In 2026 he took part in the group exhibition Zapoishche, staged in an unfinished Moscow apartment.

Artist statement:

My grandmother used to tear paper into small pieces when her memory began to fail her — a gesture I later made the title of an artist’s book. Most of my work starts like this: with something small and physical that happens inside a home when a person, or the order of things, begins to come apart. I make artist’s books, videos, and installations about what families store and what they forbid — waiting, fear, tears, the things kept “in case of guests.”

The materials carry the subject. Linocut portraits are cut apart and recombined across the spreads of a book, losing and regaining a face the way memory does. In the video Silence in Two Rooms (2025), old family footage of my grandmother’s smile plays across my own face, so that for ninety-seven seconds two people share one surface — the one who is forgetting and the one who refuses to forget. Reading Levinas while she was ill gave me a working rule I still hold to: another person is not an image to look at but someone you answer to.

Lately the household has opened onto the street. In The Low Pass (2026), sculpted children stand frozen mid-game on a football field, all of them looking up at something the viewer never sees; in No-cry (2026), a man tries to cry and can only grimace, until artificial tears are animated onto his face. I am currently preparing an exhibition project on the automatism of behaviour in urban space — how the city disciplines the body without its noticing: routes, gestures, and reactions repeat themselves until a break in the familiar order reveals how little of our movement is our own. The question that began at home thus steps out into the street: what do we owe each other in the moment before something breaks?

Practice:

Artist’s book, Moving image, Drawing, Painting, Comics

CV (PDF)
Artist statement (PDF)