Le tre vie della vita O.M.27

NICOLAI LILIN

Nicolai Lilin, a pseudonym for Nikolaj Verzhbitskiy, was chosen in homage to the author’s mother, Lilia, (Russian: Николай Вержбицкий?). Born Feb. 12, 1980, in Bender, Transnistria (an independent state not recognized by the international community, located between Moldova and Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union), he is a Siberian-born Russian writer, tattoo artist, and artist with Italian citizenship. Lilin comes from a family of Siberian traditions and origins. His ancestors belonged to a large Siberian family of explorers, outlaws, hunters, and merchants, who had Russian, Polish, Jewish, and German ancestry. In 2003 he moved to the province of Cuneo, where he became a tattoo artist, having studied the tattoos of the Siberian criminal tradition for many years and learned the techniques and complex codes that govern them. He has lived and worked in Milan since 2010. Nicolai Lilin is also known and appreciated for his artistic production, particularly drawings, graffiti works on paper, paintings on canvas and reproduction of Orthodox icons, all inspired by tattoo symbology, he has an art workshop in Milan, Kolima Art Studio where he hosts his works always related to Siberian tattoo culture. He is also on the board of Outsiders, an international collective of artists, which aims to bring back respect for form in art, in all its expressions. The artist has exhibited his works at the Milan Triennale, the Museo del ‘900 and the Castle of Susan, among others, with a solo exhibition that evokes and investigates the world of tattoos, addressed in the recovery of its ancestral meanings, rooted in anthropology, within a path that offers a more conscious key to interpreting a phenomenon rampant on the fashion front, from writing that has blossomed into cinema, from drawing that has landed in tattooing, design and fashion. Since 2019, he has been collaborating with the art gallery and print shop Originale Multiplo S.r.I (formerly Alfeart) in Milan, making Original Multiple from tattoos and unpublished images. Some of the works were exhibited at the WopArt Work on paper fair in 2020 and 2021, a well-known international fair of ancient, modern and contemporary works of art on paper in Lugano.