Ivan Simonov, Companion

We proceed from large-scale works to urban microinterventions. Companion, a work by Ivan Simonov, was created as part of #littlepeople project, which demonstrates through a play on scale that even small works can change urban environment. The picture shows a man and his dog going side by side. The characters have real-life prototypes: the painter met a man walking his pet during the storm in Zelenogradsk. Despite the rain and the wind, the pair walked along the sea beach, as if nothing on earth could trouble them. Their calm self-confidence and attachment to each other moved Ivan so deeply, that he decided to use these images in one of his projects.

Ivan Simonov is a Moscow-based painter, collagist and sculptor, who came to prominence thanks to #littlepeople project. In a series of urban interventions, Ivan not only demonstrates twists and turns of the human life, but also shows that in street art you don’t always create large-scale works or even know how to paint.

The project is a black-and-white collage, featuring fragments from lives of different people and directing the viewers’ attention to minute details that are usually missed out in the urban space.