Mikhail Shemyakin

Rider 46x46 cm, canvas, oil
Date of Birth: 1943
Place of residence: Moscow

Mikhail Shemyakin (born May 4, 1943, Moscow, RSFSR) is a Russian and American artist and sculptor. Laureate of the State Prize of the Russian Federation, People’s Artist of Kabardino-Balkaria, People’s Artist of Adygea, Honorary Doctor of a number of higher educational institutions.

Much of his childhood was spent in the GDR. In 1957, at the age of 14, he returned to the USSR, to Leningrad, where he was admitted to the secondary art school at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he studied from 1957 to 1961. He was expelled for “aesthetic corruption” of classmates and inconsistency with the norms of socialist realism.

From 1959 to 1971 he worked as a postman, janitor, for five years he worked as a rigger in the Hermitage.

In 1962, the first exhibition opened in the club of the Russian magazine “Star”. In 1967 he founded the group of artists “Petersburg”. Together with the philosopher Vladimir Ivanov, he created the theory of metaphysical syntheticism, devoted to the search for new forms of iconography, based on the study of religious art of different eras and peoples. For two years he was a novice in the Pskov-Pechora monastery.

After numerous arrests of exhibitions, confiscations of works and coercive measures of a medical nature in psychiatric hospitals [5] in 1971 he was expelled from the USSR. According to Shemyakin, the initiation of the persecution was often not law enforcement agencies, but the Union of Artists of the USSR.

After exile from the USSR he lived in Paris, in 1981 he moved to New York. In Paris he organized exhibitions and published works by his colleagues – Russian artists and nonconformist writers. In October 1990, he signed the “Roman Appeal.”

Began in the 1960s, the study of art of all times and peoples has grown into a collection of images structured by technical, historical and philosophical categories, for which he was awarded five honorary doctorates. This collection became the basis for the creation of the Institute of Philosophy and Psychology of Creativity (France).

In 2000, he founded the Imaginary Museum in Hudson, New York, where exhibitions on research topics are organized. In 2002-2003, he created the 21st series of the Mikhail Shemyakin Imaginary Museum series for the Russian Kultura channel. Since 2009 he has been organizing exhibitions based on his research materials at the Mikhail Shemyakin Foundation in St. Petersburg. In 2013 he released the first catalogs of research results.

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Works IN COLLECTION

Works IN COLLECTION