Vasily Klyukin

Vasily Klyukin was born on 3 March 1976 in Moscow. He studied economics and finance at what is now the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation in Moscow, completing a Specialist degree over 1993 to 1998, and built a career in banking and finance before turning to sculpture, architecture, and design. He describes himself, and is described by galleries, as a largely self taught artist.

His exhibition history accelerated through the 2010s. In 2017 he showed Heritage Doesn't Turn Into Ashes at Arthouse 2050 in Monaco and designed the Golden Madonnina statuette presented at Milan Design Week. In 2018 his series In Dante Veritas opened at the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg before touring to the Arsenale Nord as a collateral event of the Venice Biennale in 2019, the same year his Why People Can't Fly project was shown at Burning Man in Nevada and at the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow. In 2020 he had a solo show, The Mind Port, at Simon Lee Gallery in London. From 2022 to 2023 the Osthaus Museum Hagen in Germany presented Mind Space, and his sculpture Gluttony is reported to be on permanent view at Das Seewerk Museum in Moers, Germany. He is represented in the United States by Serge Sorokko Gallery in San Francisco, and in Europe by Arthouse 2050 in Monaco and Simon Bart Gallery in Porto Cervo, Italy. He lives and works between Monaco and the south of France.

Readers researching this name should note that public sanctions databases contain an entry for a "Klyukin, Mikhail Vasilyevich," a different individual with a different first name. The available sources do not link that entry to the artist Vasily Klyukin, and the two names should not be conflated.

Coverage of Klyukin tends to frame him through his unusual route into art from finance and through the scale of his ambition, spanning sculpture, architecture, design, and environmental advocacy rather than a conventional gallery career. His UNESCO linked One Ocean, One Future project on plastic pollution and his large scale installations, including In Dante Veritas at the State Russian Museum and the works held by the Osthaus Museum Hagen, are the pieces most consistently discussed in press coverage. No verbatim, attributable quote from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed for reproduction here, so none is quoted.

Klyukin's auction activity runs almost entirely through Phillips. The house's artist results page lists Passion & Harmony (Fuchsia-Blue) at USD 187,500 as his highest reported price, with two further lots, Venetian Virgin (Gold) and C20.H25.N3O (TRIP), each realizing GBP 150,000, and Gluttony realizing a considerably lower GBP 4,410. Exact sale dates for these results could not be confirmed from the sources available, so they are reported here without a firm date rather than as a precisely dated record. His broader market activity appears in auction databases such as Artprice and Artsy, but a clear, fully sourced ranking of all his auction results is not available.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Klyukin, and the number of his works that have come to public auction is small, so any single sale result should be read with caution rather than treated as a stable benchmark, particularly since exact sale dates for his highest reported Phillips results are unconfirmed. His current commercial representation runs through Serge Sorokko Gallery in the United States and Arthouse 2050 and Simon Bart Gallery in Europe, and provenance is best confirmed through those galleries directly; a 2020 solo show at Simon Lee Gallery in London does not by itself establish ongoing representation there. His strongest institutional signal is museum placement: the State Russian Museum and the Osthaus Museum Hagen are corroborated by multiple independent sources, while placements at Das Seewerk Museum, the Tower of David Museum, and the Malaga branch of the State Russian Museum are reported on gallery materials but were not independently corroborated in this pass. Collectors should also take care with identity: public sanctions and business databases include a similarly named "Klyukin, Mikhail Vasilyevich," a different individual, and should not be confused with the artist profiled here.