Dmytro Andrukhov with an illuminated mixed-media work in Chicago. Photo courtesy of LumiDim.
Dmytro Andrukhov is a multidisciplinary light artist based in Chicago, working through his independent studio, LumiDim. His illuminated mixed-media pieces bring together painting, graffiti markers, acrylic, UV print, and LED neon — objects that resist easy categorization, sitting somewhere between painting, sculpture, and installation.
His materials suggest two distinct visual languages meeting on a single surface. On one side: acrylic panels, UV-printed imagery, and hand-drawn marks made with graffiti markers — immediate, unpolished, closer to notation than design. On the other: LED neon, built into the structure of the piece rather than applied as an accent. The effect is work in which light is not illuminating the piece from outside it — light is the piece.
That distinction shapes how Andrukhov describes his own process. Light, in his hands, functions as material rather than decoration — closer to pigment than to a fixture. A line of neon might read as a path, a border, a scar, or a signal. It carries weight the way a painted mark carries weight, rather than simply lighting what’s already there.
A Studio for Light, Marks, and Memory
Dmytro Andrukhov with an illuminated mixed-media work in Chicago. Photo courtesy of LumiDim.
LumiDim is Andrukhov’s independent studio and the primary space for this work — one concerned less with neon as spectacle than with what happens when handmade gesture meets fabricated light. Softness against intensity. The raw mark against the controlled line. Private memory against public visibility.
Born in Ukraine and now based in Chicago, Andrukhov’s visual vocabulary carries the imprint of movement, though rarely as an explicit subject. Displacement and adaptation surface instead as fragments within the compositions themselves: partial symbols, glowing lines that behave like routes or circuits, color fields that feel at once remembered and reconstructed. The work doesn’t narrate this experience directly — it maps it, the way a diagram can suggest a territory without describing it.
Daylight and Darkness
A LumiDim artwork shown in ambient light, where surface, print, and illumination shift with the room.
Because each piece depends on both physical surface and illuminated element, it changes depending on when it’s seen. By day, the viewer meets material — texture, print, the physical build of acrylic and paint. After dark, the illuminated elements take over, shifting the emotional register of the space around the work. The same piece can read as restrained in one light and charged in another.
This dual identity is central to how the work occupies a room. These aren’t static images meant to be seen once and set aside. Reflection, shadow, ambient brightness, and the viewer’s position all become part of the experience — each piece finished as much by its surroundings as by the artist’s hand.
The tension between working modes — the immediacy of graffiti markers against the architectural precision of neon — is where much of the visual energy originates. The markers bring a human urgency, close to street notation. The neon and print introduce control and clarity. Neither dominates; the friction between them is the point.
A Separate Commercial Practice
Andrukhov’s grasp of scale, fabrication, and how illuminated objects behave inside real architecture is informed in part by his commercial practice. He is also the founder and creative director of CityNeon, a Chicago studio focused on illuminated brand environments and custom light-based installations. That experience — wiring, materials, installation, how a piece reads across a room rather than a screen — feeds back into his art, even as the two practices remain distinct in purpose and audience.
LumiDim, though, remains where the more personal language develops: a space where painting, markers, print, acrylic, and neon become tools for working through memory, displacement, and the visual noise of urban life — not for building brand environments, but for constructing a private cartography.
A Broader Shift
Andrukhov’s practice reflects a wider movement in contemporary visual culture, as neon and illuminated materials migrate from storefronts and nightlife signage into the vocabulary of artists concerned with space, memory, and atmosphere. Treated this way, light becomes a working material with its own grammar — capable of holding tension and emotional weight much as pigment or graphite can.
Through LumiDim, Andrukhov continues to develop a body of work at the intersection of contemporary light art, urban memory, and the layered visual language of a life lived between two places.
About the Artist
Dmytro Andrukhov is a Ukrainian-born multidisciplinary light artist based in Chicago. Through LumiDim, his independent studio, he works with painting, graffiti markers, acrylic, UV print, LED neon, and mixed media. He is also the founder of City Neon, a Chicago-based studio focused on illuminated brand environments and light-based installations.
