After his graduation in monumental art from the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow, Ivan Lubennikov participated in many important architectural projects that were destroyed for many of them during the last years of the soviet regime, except especially for the facade of the Taganka theater and for the Mayakovsky Museum.
In the 80s, he started to show his paintings which offer a cultivated and unrestrained reinterpretation of the art of icon, the Russian modernism of the 20th century and the European tradition, more particularly the Renaissance and artists like Caravaggio, Zurbarán, Matisse or Delvaux. His work defies any classification as it is a pure visual game combining chiaroscuro, formal sleekness and extreme stylization. Ivan Lubennikov's topics - nude, food, alcohol, Siberian landscapes - outline implicitly the portrait of an ironical and hedonist personality as well as an attentive observer of the history of Russia. Leitmotifs of his painting, women condense all the complexity of the artist. Enchanting or matriarchal, sensual or grotesque, they reflect his mood and the transformations in the society.
In the 2000s, he was in charge of the decoration of three metro stations in Moscow - Mayakovskaya in 2005, Sretensky Bulvar in 2007 et Slavyansky Bulvar in 2008 - each designed in different mediums (stained glass, mosaic, cast iron, etched steel). He also realized a monumental stained-glass window, "Ryaba la poule", for the Madeleine metro station in Paris: after the donation of a set of Hector Guimard by the company of Parisian public transport to the city of Moscow, the latter commissioned the work to Ivan Lubennikov by way of acknowledgement.
A few months before his death in 2021, the State Russian Museum of Saint-Petersburg organized a major exhibition that gathered about 60 paintings from the last five decades to celebrate the painter's 70th birthday.
His work is part of many public and private collections: State Tretyakov Gallery, State Russian Museum, Russian Academy of Arts, Saint Petersburg, Peter Ludwig Museum…