Salavat Fidai is a Russian artist who creates surprising miniature sculptures using pencil leads.
In 2013, after a more than twenty-year career as a lawyer, Fidai decided to deal with art full-time, ranging from still life photography to oil painting, and since 2014 dedicating himself to making micro-paintings on matchboxes, seeds of pumpkin and rice grains, and small-scale figurines with graphite.
With this technique – given the fragile nature of the material to be modelled, the manufacturing process is long and complex, it can even require up to three working days for a single piece – the artist has reproduced a myriad of subjects taken from films and cartoons animated, from popular culture and comics, famous works of art and architecture, including the protagonists of the famous television series Game of Thrones.
Signs of the houses of Westeros, the white walker, the king of the night, the dragons and the iron throne, of course. To create such unique miniature sculptures, I use an ordinary craft knife, a magnifying glass, and a microscope to add tiny details. I think the most elaborate piece from the Game of Thrones exhibition, it was the Iron Throne. It took me three tries and three weeks to create the final piece. The Titan of Braavos sculpture was also a tough one as there were a lot of fragile and intricate details in that piece.
Salavat Fidai
With a cutter and a stereoscopic microscope, Fidai depicted the characters and symbolic objects of the HBO record-breaking show with extreme richness of detail, from the sigils of the houses, to the full-length figurines of Arya Stark, Tyrion Lannister and Ghost (the direwolf ), to one of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons.
Salavat Fidai currently lives and works in Ufa, Russia. His micro-sculptures have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in London, Singapore, Los Angeles, Sharjah and St. Petersburg.
Photo Copyright: Salavat Fidai – salavatfidai.art – @salavat.fidai