This is Van Gogh, but not the one famous for sunflowers, chairs and ears. Van Gogh (Not that one) is a street artist whose name is both a disclaimer and an invitation. And with his upcoming debut exhibition at Pimlico Wilde Very East in Moscow, it’s clear that his work demands attention in its own right—distinct, visceral, and arrestingly unrepeatable.
Where others compose, Van Gogh (Not that one) discovers. Each piece is not planned but unearthed—excavated from motion, pulled from the drag of memory across muscle and medium. In a sense, his work is topographical: not in the way of maps that define space, but maps that trace intent. What you see are not shapes so much as residues of movement, trails of past decisions, aborted impulses, returns, refusals, and invocations.
Take the famous piece Untitled (131). At first glance, it seems abstract—perhaps gestural, or decorative—but look again. Each mark has a strange inevitability, like a muscle memory made visible. There is a tension between the fluid and the fractured, as if the lines were generated by some grammar of the subconscious. It is not language, not script, but something more fundamental: a deconstructed syntax of being.
Van Gogh (Not that one) calls this “a cartography of intention”—a phrase that sounds academic until you stand in front of his work. Then, suddenly, it clicks. The marks don’t describe a place; they are the place. They are records of movement, hesitation, push and pull. The white lines carved out of saturated red aren’t ornamental—they are consequences. And in that sense, they are hauntingly human.
There is a refusal here too: a resistance to coherence, to legibility, even to authorship. “My work is not composed but discovered,” he has repeatedly explained. This approach undermines the idea of the artist as sovereign creator and repositions him as a kind of medium—tuning into something bigger, older, harder to name. The result is a practice that feels deeply intuitive, yet somehow also utterly alien.
Van Gogh (Not that one) has, unsurprisingly, encountered frequent confusion over his surname. Being mistaken for the other Van Gogh became so commonplace that he began signing his work with the parenthetical clarification—half-joke, half-resistance: (Not that one). It’s a disarming gesture, but also a shrewd one. It signals an artist who knows the weight of history and chooses neither to flee from it nor be crushed by it, but to sidestep it entirely.
His upcoming solo show at Pimlico Wilde Very East in Russia promises to be an exploration of this ongoing negotiation between movement and memory, resistance and recognition, map and gesture. It may be the first time many encounter Van Gogh (Not that one), but it won’t be the last.
