Philipp Anaskin | Latin American Figurative Painting
Philipp Anaskin opens a new exhibition, Rostros de Poder (Faces of Power), at Museo Calderón Guardia on 10 September, showing 35 new paintings under the curation of Pedro García Dobles.
Anaskin’s work remains one of the more distinctive voices in Latin American figurative painting, formed by a background that spans two very different political histories.
Anaskin was born in Moscow in 1988 and has lived in Costa Rica since he was two years old, following his family’s move after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That dual background runs through his work: paintings inspired by Russian social realism and post-war Soviet art, filtered through Costa Rican colour and subject matter. He studied art and visual communication at the Universidad Nacional, later returning to Russia on a scholarship to study mural technique at St Tikhon’s Orthodox University in Moscow, and has since painted murals for Costa Rica’s Supreme Court, the Universidad Nacional’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, the Guayabo National Monument, and the Cervantes Institute in Istanbul.
His paintings work in a loose, saturated style, hybrid between figuration and abstraction, with backgrounds often left ambiguous or unfinished-looking against more heavily worked figures. His subjects recur across paintings: a bullfight or a religious procession carries the pull of tradition and spectacle together, and a face in the flat, saturated colour of Soviet-era posters brings that history straight into a Costa Rican setting. This approach places him within a long-running strand of Latin American figurative painting, artists like Antonio Berni, who used the human figure to speak directly to social and political conditions.
The exhibition’s title, and the curatorial note that accompanies it, affirms this territory. García Dobles frames the show around the Costa Rican saying “calladito más bonito” — being quiet is prettier — and the idea that silence can function as submission, producing an obedient, uncritical, and more easily controlled public. It’s a curatorial position with some bite to it, and one that fits an artist whose work has consistently treated power and its effects as his subject matter.
The piece featured on the invititation (below) already suggests where this is headed: a group of men in dark coats, top hats held behind their backs, arranged around a single central figure in a lighter uniform. It’s not hard to read authority and its performance into the composition, hats as props of formality, posture as its own kind of statement.
Exhibition Invitation
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The show’s title work, (Silencio) Rostros de Poder (2026, oil on canvas, 132 x 134cm), makes the connection explicit: a woman in a headscarf, her face mostly obscured by shadow, framed by pale blue lilies with a purple orchid held directly over her mouth. Anaskin has described the piece around the same ideas of this exhibition, using Mexican philosopher, poet, and diplomat, Octavio Paz’s line that “learning to doubt is learning to think” against the idea that an obedient, uncritical society is easier to control.
Philipp Anaskin, (Silencio) Rostros de Poder, 2026, Oil on canvas
Anaskin has exhibited individually and in groups across Costa Rica, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, France, and the United States, and won Costa Rica’s National Prize for Visual Arts (Premio Nacional de Artes Visuales Francisco Amighetti) in 2022, alongside the AICA Critics’ Prize the same year.
The exhibition opens at Museo Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia, housed in the historic 1912 residence of the president after whom it’s named. Calderón Guardia served as President of Costa Rica from 1940 to 1944 and is remembered chiefly for the social reforms of that period, including the founding of the University of Costa Rica and the country’s social security system.
The museum holds a permanent collection dedicated to his life and the reforms of the 1940s, alongside rotating galleries that host contemporary exhibitions like this one.
Get in touch if you’d like more information on Philipp Anaskin’s work.
Rostros de Poder opens on 10 September at 6:30pm and is until the end of November. Admission is free.
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Philipp Anaskin | Latin American Figurative Painting
Originally published at https://miramefineart.com.
