1996 | Born in Kyiv, Ukraine; he currently lives and works in Venice, Italy.

Daniel Spivakov spent his childhood in Kyiv, Ukraine. At the age of fifteen, he moved to Oklahoma through a family exchange program. Speaking only his native language, it was during that time that art became a crucial means of communication for Spivakov. The combination of a post-Soviet upbringing and adolescence in the U.S. South resulted in a unique worldview from which the artist regularly draws during his creative process. After graduating from Central Saint Martins, London, in 2020, he moved to Berlin, although he currently lives and works in Venice. Spivakov is an extraordinary artist whose presence seems steeped in magical realism. As a child, he never attended school in the conventional sense—instead, he would retreat to a nearby park, lost in thought until day’s end, his absence somehow unnoticed. This early ability to slip beyond the confines of reality would, in time, shape the course of his life. His art echoes this continual negotiation between boundaries and freedom, evident in works that defy the traditional limits of painting through stretched and overlapping canvases. Spivakov’s artistic influences—among them Julian Schnabel—have deeply shaped his approach to proportion and scale. Yet his work resists confinement to any single tradition: his paintings range from monumental to intimate, from immediately legible to deliberately enigmatic. Having grown up in Eastern Europe, Spivakov sees Venice as the perfect setting to merge diverse artistic lineages and confront the paradoxes within his own practice—at once erudite and instinctive, grounded in the world yet unbound by convention.