Catalogue of Mihail Chemiakin's 1989 landmark exhibition, held March 24 - April 24, 1989 at the Central House Of The Artist, Moscow, USSR. Beautifully Hand SIGNED and INSCRIBED by the Artist MIHAIL CHEMIAKIN on the title page in blue pen " Pour Tammy Owens om Micha Chemiakin 1989 "

Published by the Union of Artists of the USSR / Bowles Sorokko Galleries, Moscow / San Francisco, Printed in Torino, Italy by Stamperia Artistica Nazionale, 1989. First edition. Edited by Serge Sorokko. This was the first exhibition in the USSR of an artist exiled from the Soviet Union and banned by the authorities. Large format softcover, illustrated wrappers with French folds, 12.25" x 10", 158 pages of illustrations, most of them in color of Chemiakin's paintings, pastels, bronze sculptures, drawings, watercolors and a portrait of the artist. Text in Russian and English. Additionally inscribed to Tammy by Dr. Jean Audigier (beneath her essay), art history professor at the University of San Francisco where Chemiakin received an honorary doctorate, and the front/rear endpapers and some other pages are also inscribed to Tammy by people who seem to have been involved with this exhibition. VERY GOOD CONDITION: light shelfwear and a touch of sunning but overall the covers remain bright and the spine uncreased, internally, a touch of age toning to the margins otherwise tight, bright, and clean. A respectable copy of this affectionally signed vintage exhibition catalogue by an important radical artist.

Mihail Mikhailovich Chemiakin (American, b. Russia 1943) painter, graphic artist, stage designer, sculptor, and publisher now residing in France. A victim of persistent political persecution, he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1971, resettled in France and later in New York in 1981. In 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev invited him back to Russia for a retrospective exhibition ending seventy years of isolation behind the Iron Curtain. Chemiakin is one of the most important and controversial figures in contemporary Russian art. A visionary Soviet dissident avant-garde artist who was expelled from art school for failing to conform to Socialist Realist norms, imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital along with other ideological dissidents, then persecuted and ordered into exile by the Soviet KGB. He is a leading non-conformist and surrealist, a radical painter best known for his mystical, supernatural, exotic, grotesque, fanciful, brilliantly colored compositions and iconography.