Mihail Chemiakin (b.1943) – Poster for the Exhibition at Galerie J.C. Gaubert, Paris

Description

Mihail Mikhailovich Chemiakin is a Russian painter, stage designer, sculptor and publisher, and a controversial representative of the nonconformist art tradition of St. Petersburg.

Chemiakin was born to a military family. His father, a Kabardian from the Caucasus Mountains Mikhail Petrovich Kardanov, had lost his parents and was adopted by a friend of his father’s, White Army officer Piotr Chemiakin. The artist’s father eventually became a Soviet Army officer. He received one of the first Orders of the Red Banner at the age of thirteen. Chemiakin’s mother was an actress and poet Yulia Nikolaevna Predtechenskaya of Russian noble heritage. She met her future husband in 1941 with the start of the Great Patriotic War and asked him to take her to the front line. She served in cavalry under the command of Lev Dovator and took part in battles alongside her husband.

Mihail Chemiakin spent his early years in East Germany where his father served. His family returned to the Soviet Union in 1957. He studied at the secondary school of art affiliated with the Il’ya Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad, but was expelled from it in 1961 for ‘aesthetic deprivation’ of classmates and failing to conform to Socialist Realism norms. Between 1959 and 1971 he did all kind of niche jobs and in-between took part in different art projects.

He later got a job at the Hermitage Museum. With his colleagues from the museum Chemiakin organized an exhibition in 1964, after which the director of the museum was fired and all the participants forced to resign. In 1967 he founded the group of artists called St. Petersburg. Together with the philosopher Vladimir Ivanov he created a treatise called Metaphysical Synthesism dedicated to ‘new forms of icon painting based on studying of religious art of all epochs and nations’. He was subjected to forced psychiatric treatment and in 1971 he was exiled from the Soviet Union. According to Chemiakin, the KGB officer behind this actually saved him by offering to ‘quietly leave the country’ with $50 in the pocket, because some people from the Artists’ Union of the USSR insisted on his isolation.

He settled in France where he published Apollon-77, an almanac of post-Stalinist art, poetry, and photography. He moved to New York in 1981. Since the early 1990s he started visiting Russia once again, working on street shows by Slava Polunin, ballets by the Mariinsky Theatre, a TV series by Russia-K and other government-backed projects. In 2007 he returned to France where he currently resides.