Alexander Tinei

Born in pre-independence Moldova, Alexander Tinei describes himself as ‘an absoluteproduct of a soviet culture, transformed into western culture, transformed into myself’. His striking portraits of tattooed young subjects reveal his preoccupation with what constitutes a hero, and how issues concerning identity and the roles of authority and iconography are involved in the hero making process. Tinei‘s work is strongly influenced by the incongruence of growing up in Moldova, speaking Russian and accepting Russian heroes such as Pushkin, Dostaevsky and heroes of Russian art history such as Repin and Serov, while not actually being Russian himself. His portraits also reflect his new-found Christian faith, metaphors for how the artist views himself, often masked, neither human nor alien; a new creation.