Illya Chychkan

Illya Chychkan (, born 29 August 1967) is a Ukrainian artist. He is a representative of the art Ukrainian New Wave movement, which emerged in the 1990s. He is a third generation artist. He lives and works in Berlin, and Kyiv, as a painter, author of installations, and develops photo and video-projects.

Early life Born in Kiev, Ukraine, Illya Chychkan is the grandson of , a Ukrainian socialist realist painter and professor at the Kyiv Art Institute. His father, Arkadii Chychkan, was a Ukrainian nonconformist artist. He participated in "The exhibition of 13" (1979), a manifestation of Ukrainian painters' resistance to social realism.

Personal life In 2014, Chychkan along with his wife Masha Shubina, visited India. During winter, he paints there.

Chychkan has a daughter, Sasha. She is a co-author of Psychodarwinism. In a dialogue with Marat Gelman with Kostyantyn Doroshenko they discussed the exhibition New Psychodarwinism. The artist took it as a basis for famous paintings of the Tretyakov Gallery depicting the main characters as monkeys. Analyzing the artist's blasphemous gesture Doroshenko remarked: "Imperial totalitarian society puts art on a pedestal as something that rises above life and directs it… « Psychodarwinism» - a proposal to abandon elitism and hierarchies.». Chychkan's children, David and Oleksandra, are Ukrainian artists.

Literature Perscha Kollektija Exhibition Catalogue, Kyiv, 2003 From Red to Yellow to Blue, Ludmila Bereznitsky, Kyiv, 2004 Illya & Sasha Chichkan. PsychoDarwinism. Back to the Roods : exhibition catalogue 23.11–14.12.2017. Kyiv : [Golden Section], 2017. 46 p. Conversation Marat Gelman with an art critic. New "Psychodarwinism" by Ilya Chichkan.Zima magazine.17.02.2021