Yehor Bread: “A Constraint Becomes the Leading Advantage”

July 2026 · Interview by Stanislav Arnautov · Berlin–Prague · 16 min read

Read the five deck titles together and something becomes obvious.

Good news. User manual. Parental advisory. Best regards. Approximate calculation.

Every one is a phrase from ordinary administrative life — an email sign-off, a warning label, the heading of an instruction booklet, a line from an invoice. None of them is the sort of language art usually reaches for. That is the point, and it is the thread running through everything below.

Working across media

You work across visual books, illustration, tattooing and music. How did you end up on the border between forms rather than inside one of them?

I have been making things since I was very young. As a teenager friends pulled me into music, but at the time I did not think much about what I was doing or why. I simply liked drawing and learning to play.

Later, when I started developing my outlook deliberately — through culture and counterculture, philosophy, travel — the question arrived: who am I, what am I for, where am I going? For a long time it bothered me that I could not name my creative specialisation. Then at some point I realised that in defining myself I was narrowing myself, trimming off exactly the rough edges that make a person individual.

Multidisciplinarity turned out to be a feature, not a bug. What interests me is how my way of seeing reacts when the medium changes. Each time you discover yourself again: you look at an embroidery, a book, an illustration, a tattoo or a piece of music and realise — so I can be this as well. It is a kind of self-portrait. You blow the dust off a book and the pattern on the cover comes through more clearly. It is an absorbing thing to do, and it feeds itself.

Where a work starts

You describe looking for the moment an emotion or a memory becomes physical form. What does that actually look like in practice?

This is the most interesting question in my practice, because it is hard to put into words or rationalise. A vortex starts up — a strange salad of emotions, thoughts, opinions and experience. At some point it all connects, and an instant later it flies apart into fragments. Like a mincer that grinds everything into one.

I would compare it to the way Plato described the creative process: you are a hunter running after your animal, and you have to wear it out. Not let it slip away, not let go, even when you are barely touching it.

From the outside I probably look like an amorphous jellyfish staring at a wall with glassy eyes. But describing the process fully is difficult even to myself. However banal it sounds, there really is something mystical in it that resists being given verbal form.

Why words

A lot of your work is text — GOOD NEWS, USER MANUAL, PARENTAL ADVISORY. Why words? What does a phrase do that an image cannot?

Text works as an additional layer of meaning. Sometimes it supports the image, sometimes it invites you to look at it from a completely different side. That is how unexpectedly ironic, paradoxical meanings open up. And sometimes the text turns out to be something utterly mundane — that is its duality.

What matters to me is showing a person not just an image but a kind of system. So a work can consist of text, image, textures, sounds, photographs, literary inserts and cultural references. It adds depth and widens the space for interpretation. It is a big game: by introducing an extra instruction, you give it extra levels.

This is where the five deck titles earn a second look. Best regards is how you end a message to someone you do not know well. Parental advisory is a label applied to something judged unsuitable. Approximate calculation is what an estimate is called when nobody wants to commit to a number. User manual assumes there is a correct way to operate the thing.

Each phrase carries an entire tone of voice with it — polite, bureaucratic, cautionary — and none of that tone belongs to the image underneath. The gap between the two is the work.

Crimea, and what stayed

You are from Crimea and now live in Prague. What from those roots still feeds the work?

I have lived in many cities and travelled a lot by hitchhiking, always carrying a sense of home with me. It was a mental rucksack holding an enveloping warmth. For around twenty years I lived in a place where both the sea and the mountains were within walking distance. Anyone who has lived in Crimea understands that strange feeling: unhurriedness, a sense that life is endless. You need nothing. Everything you need is already there — mountains, junipers, hot sea air, like-minded people, and indifference to time.

We played music every day: improvising, performing in the street, giving concerts. Once a week I tried to hitchhike somewhere with no destination. As a friend of mine put it back then, "resting without getting tired". It was an adventurous life straight out of a picture.

The other thing that matters is that I have been skiing and snowboarding almost since I could walk. From about ten my older brother dragged me along to snowboard parties and contests. That feeling of drive, youth and recklessness caught me back then. Only fifteen years later did I understand that the foundation of how I see the world was laid at that exact moment. I think the wishes and outlook of childhood form the base of a person. After that it is a question for the adult: does he understand how it still governs him, and can he act on what he wanted as a child?

Music and image

Psychedelic music and visual art — how are they connected in your head?

In both visual and musical work, what matters to me is conveying a single state. They are different media with one idea: to speak about something that has no form. About what comes before form.

Creative work does not have to be beautiful or well-ordered, but it has to be about something. It does not always need a comprehensible shape. Sometimes even ugly art is beautiful art.

We do not come to know ourselves by looking in a mirror. The truest method is making things. That is the real mirror of a person.

Chromatic aberration, branching networks, insect anatomy — the visual equivalent of what he describes as a state rather than a subject.

The deck as a constraint

What did you feel seeing your work on an actual deck rather than a screen or paper?

It is one of the things that drives me most. First there is the thought of making a project, and some time later you are holding the product you worked on. It is the materialisation of your own thinking.

More than that, it is a thing people use and feel something looking at. When I did my first collaboration with a skate team it was a childish, undisguised delight. It was especially good to see boards with my prints on them held by people I did not know. That feeling more than covers all the drawbacks that exist in any profession.

The deck is narrow, vertical, opinionated. Did it change how you build a composition?

This is the case where a limitation becomes the leading advantage. I like working on projects with hard constraints on format, colour or idea. A constraint gives an enormous boost to the creative approach, because it forces you to find the non-obvious. When you have every possibility available, the creative move can literally stall. The narrow board format is already a very hard starting restriction. You have to work with what there is and find the answer in tight, sometimes uncomfortable conditions.

It turns into a game and a personal challenge, almost a duel. Either you take it or it takes you. But you know it has no chance. What remains is to live through a few attempts and work out which way you finally beat it.

That answer is worth pausing on, because it describes from the inside something this blog has argued from the outside. Skate graphics have always been composed for the board rather than adapted onto it, which is one reason the format has produced such distinctive work for fifty years — the history of deck graphics covers that. A reproduction of a rectangular painting has to negotiate with the shape. Work made for it does not.

The one he keeps coming back to

Which of your decks is closest to you, and why?

In each deck I tried to build a separate graphic and semantic system. But the board with the smile and the words "Was It Good Enough?" seems to me the most interesting. Dramaturgically. In it the visual and textual layers create an additional literary line. A question arises: what happened to this person, why is a tooth knocked out, why are the lips painted, why is he smiling so unsettlingly, and why is he asking whether it was good enough? There is the fact of an action and a closing question, but no beginning to the story. That incompleteness leaves room for interpretation: a fight, sex, some absurd incident. The work tells us immediately that an event occurred, and at the same time tells us nothing about it.

That deck came out of a different collaboration and is not in the deckarts catalogue — but the mechanism he describes is exactly what the five decks here run on.

On hesitating

Your work is conceptual and not decorative in the usual sense. What would you say to someone who likes a piece but hesitates to put something that unusual on their wall?

I would not recommend anything. If a person is in doubt, most likely they are not ready. I am not going to persuade anyone, and I am fine with the fact that some people do not fully understand what I make.

Every product will find its one person and three people who do not get it. You can make yourself more widely understood, but to do that you have to move into cliché, pop and mass-market goods. That is what I want least. So I am grateful to the people and teams who value and support what I do. I make fairly niche art, and that is exactly where its value is: it works as a filter. And that is fine.

A filter, in his words — work that is not trying to be liked by everyone.

Beyond the decks

The five decks are one output of a much wider practice, and the archive makes the connection to what he said about philosophy explicit.

Two of his archive illustrations take their titles directly from Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil (2022) builds its composition around one of the best-known aphorisms and sets it against a field of branching orange nodes and a hard-edged chrysanthemum. Human, All Too Human (2022) takes the other title and populates it with a classical marble torso, a green-faced man, a red skeleton, a blue parrot and a ram — a catalogue of what the phrase might cover.

This is the same device as the decks, run at a larger scale. A borrowed phrase arrives carrying its own weight — in this case a century and a half of philosophy — and the image underneath neither illustrates it nor ignores it. The friction is the content.

Not all of it is playful.

A jester in orange and yellow stripes, skull-faced, carrying a flag in one hand and trailing a yellow balloon, stands across three words in enormous type: WAR TERROR VIOLENCE. The date on it is February 2024. The artist is from Crimea. The picture does not explain itself and does not need to.

The practice also runs to printed books and to work at architectural scale — a walk-in installation shown in June 2024, its walls covered edge to edge in black-and-white collage: a wolf, a Venus, geometric overlays, QR codes linking out to his music.

Where to find his work

The visual work lives mainly on Instagram and Behance.

For music, SoundCloud holds the archive — live sets, jams and psychedelic sketches, many of which never reached a final form. The finished releases are on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music.

Where these decks belong

These are statement pieces in the sense the contemporary and pop art guide uses the term: text-driven, high contrast, built to be read at a glance. That means they want a wall to themselves rather than a place in a group. Hung beside pictorial work they argue with it; hung alone on a narrow wall they do exactly what they are meant to.

They also belong on a light wall rather than a dark one. Like all flat-colour graphic work, they depend on contrast the wall should not absorb — the colour guide explains why period and construction matter more than palette matching. Sizing and mounting are covered in the sizes guide and the mounting guide.

Related reading

• Contemporary and pop art — text as image, and where it belongs
• History of deck graphics — why the format produced such distinctive work
• Colour guide — matching work to walls
• Materials and quality — how a deck is printed
• Skateboard Wall Art: the complete guide

Interview conducted in Ukrainian and translated for publication. Answers are Yehor Bread's own; edited only for length and clarity. Artwork © Yehor Bread.