Art by Andrei Bodko

Bodko is a Russian iconographer, trained at Saint Tikhon's Orthodox University in Moscow, who spent his early twenties working as a street artist before turning to religious painting professionally around 2009. What makes his work distinctive is where he places Christ: not in traditional Orthodox iconostasis settings, but in ordinary contemporary scenes. His 2024 series "Always Near" shows Christ reaching into a manhole to pull out a child, sharing a meal with construction workers on a job site, sitting with someone in visible distress. He's explicit that these aren't icons in the liturgical sense but religious paintings drawing on the older tradition of Russian lubki, cheap illustrated folk prints that carried religious and moral stories to people who couldn't read.

One image in particular escaped the religious-art world entirely: "Christ and Nikolai Gogol Eating Spaghetti," which spread widely across Tumblr and other platforms through 2025 and 2026, mostly among people with no connection to Orthodox Christianity at all, drawn to its plain warmth and its odd, specific humor.