Vaisberg Matvii

Matvii Vaisberg is a Ukrainian painter, graphic artist, book illustrator. Was born on December 28, 1958 in Kyiv.

The son of Semion Vaisberg, a chess player, and Shelly Harzman, an art critic, the grandson of the poet Matvey Harzman. His grandmother on the father’s side was the seven-time Ukrainian chess champion Berta Vaisberg. He finished T.H. Shevchenko Republican Art School (1977) and graduated from Ivan Fedorov Ukrainian Printing Institute (1985). Since 1988, he has been participating in collective exhibitions, while his first solo show was held in 1990 in Kyiv (Museum of the History of Podil).

More than fifty of both group and his personal exhibitions have taken place by now, including those in the National Art Museum (1987, 2011,2019), Kyiv National Museum of Russian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (Odesa) , Cherkasy Museum of Fine Arts, Berlin Wall Museum (Berlin), Ukrainian Institute of America (New York), Europe House (London), the Sejm of the Republic of Poland, National museum of Georgia.

He is the author of painting cycles “Seven Days” (1998-1999), “Judaean Desert” (2001), “Anthropic Principle” (2004-2008), “Dancings” (2006-2009), “Scenes from the Tanakh” (2006),“Pur Vital” (2006), “Threetwotwo” (2009), “The Wall” (based on the prints for the Old Testament by Hans Holbein the Younger, 2012), “Holy Heaven Remains Silent” (2008), and others.

In 2011, he became one of the founding members of the informal creative group “Synii Zhovten”. Other founding members and participants of the creative projects are Olena Pryduvalova, Ahra Ajinjal, Oleksii Apollonov, Oleksii Beliusenko and Borys Firtsak.

Weisberg’s paintings and drawings are on display in museums in Kyiv, Vilnius, Chicago, Berlin, etc., and in numerous private collections around the world. In 2014, the Magnes Museum (Berkeley, California) acquired 12 works by Matvii Vaisberg, including portraits of famous Jewish poets and writers.