Vladimir Budnikov was born in Kiev in 1947. In 1965, he graduated from the Republican Art School named after T. G. Shevchenko in Kyiv, and later, in 1971, at the Kyiv Art Institute, where he studied in the monumental painting workshop under the guidance of Tatiana Yablonska. Since 1969, he has been actively involved in exhibition activities. In 1972 he began teaching painting and composition at the Kyiv State Art Institute. Budnikov's practice covers painting, graphics and work with spatial objects.

Vladimir Budnikov is considered a researcher in the field of pictorial metaphysics and a follower of the neo-baroque current in non-figurative painting. The artist combines expressive painting with graphic elements, creating dynamic images that balance between abstraction and figurativeness. His paintings are built on the tension of contrasts: dense planes and transparent lines, chaos and structure, material and spiritual.

The artist prefers abstract painting, considering it as the basis of a realistic perception of the world. His works are built on principles close to music and dance: they have palpable rhythm, improvisation and inner energy. Texts, symbols and fragmentary images woven into the composition give the paintings multilayeredness, turning them into a kind of visual chronicles of internal and external processes.

For Budnikov, painting is a language, a “writing” that becomes alive and at the same time stands on the border between image and narrative. This approach associates his art with Neo-Expressionism, but at the same time gives him a unique language, where spontaneity and energy become the main means of expression that carry their own meaning.
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“Every form of mine is constantly changing, figurative works are transformed into abstractions and vice versa. When working on the “Realism?” series, I would compare my work to the moving structures of an overgrown garden. The way wildlife affects or subjugates order is reminiscent of changes in my visual tropes over time. Reality works in mysterious ways, but some rules and movements can be outlined in the visible world. I follow these lines. They are incomprehensible as riddles. I express what I have seen, with my lines and actions, through my works: many things that are important to me cannot be put into words”

— Vladimir Budnikov

Since 1975, Vladimir Budnikov has been a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine and an Honored Artist of Ukraine. In 1993, the work of Vladimir Budnikov became the topic of a dissertation at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Personal exhibitions took place in Vienna, Paris, Berlin and many other European cities. In 2002, he received the title of professor of the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture. In 2019, the independent magazine “Y” awarded him with the Order “For Intellectual Courage”.

“The chosen path of Vladimir Budnikov is a path in mystery, in the universality almost exclusively of painting, or rather, pictorial form. Picturesque is the main distinguishing feature of the figurative world of this artist. His views on the character of painting are very lively, changeable, sometimes contradictory, diverse, as the very essence of the species nature of painting”

— art critic Oleksandr Solovyov
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Since 2011, he has been working in a creative dialogue with the artist Vlada Ralko. Much of the time the artists spent in residences in the Crimea. After the annexation of the peninsula and the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014, they actively cooperate with the artistic association Red Black. In the Kaniv Residence, artists focused on making sense of war and ideologies, creating a series of collaborative series, including a three-year cycle “Three steps”, which includes the series “The Poet's Shelter”(2014), “Shelter”(2015) and “Line of demarcation”(2016). Budnikov also creates personal series — “Question to the visible”, “Instead of a document”, “Flight”, which were continued in special book editions of the Red Black Foundation with reproductions of works and interviews with the artist.

Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Budnikov has mainly lived and worked in Berlin. Together with Vlada Ralko they founded the residence a_brukewhere they continue to conceptualize in the language of art the experience of war, loss and forced emigration.
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