Nikita Gavrilenko trained to build aircraft, then to manage industry, before he ever trained to make a poster — a hairpin turn that puts him in company with more than a few designers in this gallery. He works now as a graphic designer and photographer out of Helsinki, Finland, having grown up in Kazakhstan, and is currently a Master’s student in Visual Communication Design at Aalto University and a member of Grafia, the Finnish association for visual communication designers.

His posters move between the political and the deliberately absurd, and juries have noticed: “Young Military Expert Cartoon Club” and “Rap Ambush” were Poster Stellars 2023 finalists, alongside “I Am F*cking Wasted” in the Ecological category; “Ich Bin Der Zorn Gottes” and “Omega VR Time Travel Company” made the Poster Stellars 2024 finalist list a year later.

For “Poster Fighter”, he paired with Japanese artist Nanako Ueda on a joint exhibition of posters inspired by medieval Asian warriors and martial arts, shown at Luonnos-ikkuna in Helsinki from January to April 2025 — a Kazakhstan-raised designer and a Japan-born one meeting in the middle on a shared visual language of combat and armour, which is as good a case as any for what a poster can do that a paragraph can’t. His anthology piece, “Catching the Big Fish”, set in CoFo Kak and CoFo Sans Mono, ran in the Bankov Poster School’s fifth-anniversary show on Times Square in June 2025.

Why we like it: it takes David Lynch’s line about ideas literally and goes fishing.

Find Nikita online: Website · Instagram