BONIAN SPACE is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in China, From Nickie Zimov, With Love, by the Russian artist Nickie Zimov, from October 18 to November 16, 2025. Curated by Prahuba WU, the exhibition centers on painting and will feature more than twenty of his recent works. His practice involves multiple layers of oil, acrylic powder, and mixed media. Although modest in scale, each painting boasts remarkable visual density. The compact, fragmentary compositions seem to capture a suspended moment—an instant paused between breath and silence.
His works are tender yet restrained, dominated by muted ochres, beiges, and dark browns that lend the canvas an atmosphere of melancholy and stillness. Nickie Zimov’s paintings are suffused with a delicate sensitivity and emotional intensity, constructing an image-based narrative that oscillates between intimacy and distance, reality and fantasy—subtle, compressed, and full of tension.
Painting has always been for Nickie Zimov a form of self-narration, as well as a sustained inquiry into intimacy. From his earliest Kiss series, he has woven fluctuations of emotion, the warmth of relationships, and the fragility of the human heart into his canvases with a soft yet determined touch. This series has accompanied his creative path for more than a decade—at fifteen, at twenty-five, and even at thirty, he continues to return to the same subject: the embrace and kiss shared between two people, a moment where affection and distance intertwine. For him, it is “a real moment that only two people can truly feel,” a fragment of time crystallized, an unspeakable memory.
At the same time, Nickie Zimov’s works also contain a reflection on the act of seeing itself. He depicts these scenes from the viewpoint of an observer, yet never crosses the boundary into direct narrative. The viewer, invited into an ambiguous position of looking, becomes both a voyeur and a co-conspirator of emotion. The stillness in his paintings is not passive—it is a sensory suspension, a prolonging of perception that allows desire and loneliness to mingle within the gaze.
The female figures in his paintings are among the most distinctive elements of his visual language. These girls are not drawn directly from reality; rather, they are projections of dreams, memories, emotions, or desire. Oscillating between tenderness and indifference, their presence feels both near and distant. The tension between intimacy and estrangement is the most delicate force within Nickie Zimov’s imagery. He deliberately controls the spatial and emotional distance between figures, freezing in time the gestures of approach and withdrawal, longing and hesitation, touch and gaze—as if staging an ongoing psychological negotiation, a silent emotional play reminiscent of an old film.
In addition to his long-evolving Kiss series, this exhibition also presents Nickie Zimov’s recent projects from the past year, including Summer Diary and Lines. Unlike his depictions of intimate relationships, these new works appear lighter in mood and reveal a more candid use of painting as a diary-like medium. Sunlight, flowers, and youthful figures fill the scenes, and fleeting moments of summer emanate a sense of relaxation and sensuality through bright colors and fluid brushwork. As he wrote, “Romantic plots temporarily take a back seat, yet my private emotions toward the world and myself remain.”
The emergence of the Lines series marks Nickie Zimov’s deeper exploration of subconscious possibilities. For him, the act of drawing lines is akin to meditation and hypnosis—the alternating shades and densities resemble the black-and-white fragments of lived experience. A certain hypnotic rhythm is pushed to its fullest expression in these recent works, allowing viewers to hear, through the interwoven lines, the slow passage of time.
Whether in the instant of a kiss or the hesitation of parting, Nickie Zimov continues to record emotions that language cannot contain—about intimacy and solitude, memory and time, life and dreams. He never pursues overt, external narratives; instead, through continuous self-observation and a gentle sincerity, he depicts the most tender and vulnerable facets of human emotion.
