The Periodic Table of Art Elements is a visual and conceptual mapping of art history — a system that translates centuries of artistic expression into a unified visual language. Drawing inspiration from Mendeleev’s scientific model, the project reimagines art history as an interdependent structure where every artwork, movement, and idea functions as an “element” within a larger creative organism.

Comprising 276 individual visual “cells,” the work treats each artist or artifact as a molecule of meaning — unique yet inseparable from its neighbors. Through clusters and cross-connections, the table exposes how influence circulates through time: between ancient myths and contemporary pixels, sacred symbols and industrial materials, gesture and algorithm.

The project merges text and image, theory and materiality. Each element is accompanied by a concise textual reflection, while the composite grid — rendered in a pixelated visual vocabulary — becomes both archive and abstraction. The act of pixelation operates as a metaphor for compression, translation, and the search for universal structure within the chaos of art history.

In this sense, The Periodic Table of Art Elements is not only a taxonomy, but also a living network — a visual “neural map” of culture. It aims to transform the vast, uneven landscape of art into a single field of interconnected energy, where the Renaissance converses with Minimalism, the sacred with the conceptual, and the painterly with the digital.

Marina Abramović – A pioneering performance artist known for testing the limits of physical and mental endurance. Her works often involve direct engagement with the audience, pushing boundaries of trust, vulnerability, and time in art. Abramović’s endurance-based pieces have redefined performance as a legitimate and powerful art form.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian painter whose fantastical composite portraits—assembled from fruits, vegetables, books, fish, and other objects—pushed Renaissance imagination into the realm of the surreal. By transforming everyday items into human likenesses, he revealed how identity can be built from symbols, metaphors, and the strange logic of visual play.

Chuck Close was an American painter famous for his massive, photo-realistic portraits made up of tiny, colorful grids or brushstrokes. By breaking down faces into abstract patterns that resolve into striking likenesses from a distance, he challenged how we see identity and representation.

Bernd and Hilla Becher were a German artist couple who meticulously photographed industrial structures—water towers, blast furnaces, grain silos—with strict, consistent framing and overcast light. Their systematic “typologies” transformed functional architecture into a kind of quiet sculpture, influencing generations of photographers and conceptual artists.

Francisco Goya was a Spanish painter and printmaker whose work spans from elegant court portraits to dark, haunting explorations of human cruelty and madness. His bold brushwork and intense imagery captured the turmoil of his era, making him a pioneer of modern art’s emotional and psychological depth.

Do Ho Suh is a Korean artist known for his intricate, large-scale fabric sculptures and installations that explore themes of home, identity, and displacement. By recreating architectural spaces—like apartments and doorways—in translucent textiles, he invites viewers to reflect on memory, personal history, and the fluid nature of belonging.

Katsushika Hokusai was a Japanese ukiyo-e master whose woodblock prints and paintings captured the beauty and drama of nature, urban life, and folklore. Best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, he combined bold compositions, rhythmic line work, and innovative perspectives, leaving a lasting influence on both Japanese and Western art.

Jackson Pollock shattered the conventions of painting by turning the canvas into an arena of action. His rhythmic drips and splatters captured the raw pulse of motion and emotion, making process itself the essence of creation — a choreography of chaos that redefined what painting could be.

Johannes Vermeer transformed quiet domestic scenes into moments of timeless contemplation. Through his masterful use of light, he revealed the sacred stillness of everyday life, turning simple gestures and interiors into meditations on perception and serenity.

Imagine a special art history where each painting is represented by a single pixel, created by averaging the painting’s color palette.

The uniqueness of each pixel lies in its almost unrepeatable color. In the digital world, the simplest color model contains 16.8 million color variations.

This allows me to combine large arrays of pixels into compositions that reflect periods, collections, or art movements and compare their chromatic differences.

I can pose both simple and complex questions that have not been asked before:

* Is there a difference between artists whose names start with the letter A, P and those with the letter Z?

* How do various art movements differ from one another?

* What are the unique features of museum collections?

* How do the color palettes in the paintings of men and women intersect?

* Are there noticeable differences between pre-war and post-war years?

* How does the color palette of an artist’s work change between youth and maturity?

* A comparison of official and unofficial art in the USSR and Nazi Germany.

* Is there a noticeable difference in the palettes of good and bad paintings (expensive and inexpensive)?

* Comparison of the color palettes of nations.

And so on…

Let's complicate the issue. How to highlight a large amount of work with any features that affect the result? The history itself suggests the principle of dividing artists by style. Let's compare Byzantine art, Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Conceptual art and other movements. The difference is clear and multifaceted. You can draw conclusions and analyze. 2020, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

Let's complicate the issue. How to highlight a large amount of work with any features that affect the result? The history itself suggests the principle of dividing artists by style. Let's compare Byzantine art, Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Conceptual art and other movements. The difference is clear and multifaceted. You can draw conclusions and analyze. 2020, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

How do wars affect art? Is there something in color that betrays a premonition of war and something that indicates war-weariness at the end of it? For the experiment, I used the years preceding and following the two great wars of the twentieth century: 1913, 1919 and 1938, 1946. Intuition suggested that the difference would be obvious, but the result surprised me. Perhaps the artists of the twentieth century did not reflect on real life as much as belonging to any art movement. 2022, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

Museums. Do long-term collections, biases of different selection committees and curators affect the color of pixel compositions? For even greater “beauty” of the experiment, I choose 3 museums in New York (Metropolitan, Guggenheim, MOMA) and 3 museums in Paris (Louvre, d’Orsay, Center J. Pompidou). There is a difference. Not so striking. But it gives food for thought. 2022, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

Working on comparing the most expensive paintings (between $75 and almost $500 millions) and the bad paintings (official movement) in my project, I realized that the history of painting is a billion shades of gray. 2022, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

How do political leanings affect art? Politicians classify artists as one group or another. We remember the "degenerate art" during the third Reich and can compare it with the official creations (small but manageable difficulty in finding work) of the same period. A couple of Soviet and nonconformist arts in the USSR is also interesting. Influence and very eloquently. 2022, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

We know many examples of the creative longevity of artists. Let's see how youthful enthusiasm is replaced by skill and wisdom. Each of the 100 artists is represented by one of their first and last works. 2022, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

Speaking about the influence on color in the history of art, one cannot avoid such an important topic as the material used by artists. In addition to tempera, oil paints, acrylic, we should pay attention to stained glass and mosaics. For an adequate result, I use the works of the classical period for these materials. Also, when working on stained glass windows, I remove the color of lead from the averaging, which almost always looks like black on photographs. 2022, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

It is not about finding differences, but about identifying commonality of the color pixel, despite ... the differences of nations. In this case, it is necessary to comply a single algorithm for selecting pictures and their color averaging. The first is a selection of 100 countries with a sufficient number of artists in Google search. Second - each country is represented by 35-50 authors, one (the first in the search display) picture from each artist. Third - step by step averaging of each work, transforming into a same size pixel and averaging all 35-50 pixels into one, then placing them in alphabetical order. 100 (10x10) pixel-nations with fairly similar hues. Does this mean that there are national differences in general color? No, a more complete sample is needed for such verification. Perhaps we need all artists of every country and all of their works. Also this result will depend on the changes in color reproduction when working in Photoshop by millions of photographers and a displacement of this mass of photos across the expanses of Google. 2022, 30x30 inches, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.