EXCEL ART

Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present EXCEL ART, a solo exhibition by Oleksiy Sai. Drawing on more than two decades of the artist’s Excel-Art series, the exhibition presents works from 2017 to 2026, each created in Microsoft Excel and printed once on aluminum. It marks the artist’s first solo presentation at the gallery’s Miami location.

Every medium has a reputation. To know which a work belongs to is often enough to condition one’s view of it in advance, a view that frequently lies beyond the artist’s control. It is a collective thought formed by the many onlookers who have, in one way or another, come to know the medium — each bias different, and each an accumulation of past experiences. Embedded in that reputation is a promise of skill, and the less familiar one is with a medium, the more readily one defers to it.

Oleksiy Sai disrupts this pattern by abiding by it. There is no better way to plainly describe Sai’s work than to see it for what it is, Excel-Art. Art made in Excel. With a program this familiar, there is nothing to defer to, and the viewer is left to measure the skill for themselves. The recognizability of some of the works lends them a legibility that extends their reach to a far wider audience, not least anyone who has used the software themselves.

The widespread use of this medium far from the white cube only pushes the work further into a kind of deadpan absurdity, and it is precisely this distance that allows the medium to subvert the very biases it carries. Whatever one expects from a spreadsheet has no bearing on a lion built from colored cells. It’s funny, though you may hold back a laugh for fear of seeming to have missed the point. Despite what one would assume, Sai has never framed the work as a satire of the workplace. It’s simply Excel-Art. Art made in Excel. The skeleton lies on an island, and the lamb uses a laptop.