Description
PLAY WITH FLYING HEAD by Mihail Chemiakin
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PLAY WITH FLYING HEAD by Mihail Chemiakin is a lithograph with an image size of 22″ X 18″ plus full margins, The edition size is 300. It is pencil signed and numbered by the artist.
Figures in the Carnival of St. Petersburg series of many great lithographs, by Mihail Chemiakin, depict characters in costume during the time of ‘Carnival’ in the period of Peter the Great.
One of the most impostant international artists of our time,Chemiakin’s artworks are exhibited by leading museums and galleries world wide. A quote from the Robb Report (Jan. 1995) states “so great are his talents that he is one of the few artists working today who sets the standard by which all other contemporary art is measured”.
“Mihail Chemiakin, by all accounts is an innovator and true creator. His passion for art, his creativity, his method and technical skills are among the strongest arguments which can be offered in support of the judgement, which ranks him as one of the great artists of our time. I became convinced that I was facing one of those great men who can change the course of the history of art”. (Dr. Jean Audijier – Head of the Art Dept., University of San Francisco)
He has earned 5 honorary doctorates. The Hermitage Museum held an exhibition in Oct. 1995 of such magnitude that a 7 volume catalog was printed for it.
The extent of his accomplishments, exhibitions and awards are too great to even try and mention.
TITLES OF THE PICTURES – (Click on any picture to enlarge it)
Tthe picture shown with President Boris Yeltsin, Chemiakin is receiving the ‘State Prize of Russia” for Arts and Letters.
The next picture shows Chemiakin with President Gerald Ford.
The next picture shows Chemiakin with President Gorbachov.
The next picture shows Chemiakin with Sidney Poitier.
The next picture shows Chemiakin with Vladimir Putin in July 2001
The next picture shows a scupture of Casanova by Chemiakin in St. Mark’s Square.
The last picture is of Chemiakin painting in 1978.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
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, 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 Banne 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 worked various niche jobs, in-between which he participated 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.
Chemiakin works in a broad range of media and subjects, as can be seen in the 2010 two-volume book on his art, Mihail Chemiakin (Azbooka publishers, St. Petersburg).
He has illustrated books for Mikhail Yupp.
In 2001, commissioned by the City of Moscow, Chemiakin created a monument “Children Are the Victims of Adult Vices“, a group of sculptures in a park 2000 feet south of the Kremlin, behind the British Ambassador’s residence. Other sculptures by Chemiakin include Peter the Great in St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress, Peter the Great in London, Monument to Victims of Terrorism in Vladikavkaz (North Ossetia), Vladimir Vysotsky in Samara, Russia.
Since roughly 2001, he has worked as an artistic designer on the Russian animated feature film Hoffmaniada. In 2001 he directed and designed an entirely new production of The Nutcracker for the Mariinsky Theater, where he also created a second ballet based on the same tale by Hoffman, “The Magic Nut”. In 2010 the artist created a new production of “Coppelia” for the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theater.
