CHEMIAKIN Volumes I (Petersburg Period / Paris Period) and II (Transformation / New York Period)

Volume I is SIGNED & INSCRIBED by the Artist MIHAIL CHEMIAKIN on the title page in black ink " Pour Tammy (???) Micha Chemiakin 1986 "

Published by Mosaic Press, Ontario, Canada, printed in Torino, Italy, 1986. First edition. Two Volume Set. Large format softcovers with French folds, 12.25" x 10.25", 504 pages and 480 pages respectively, both volumes are richly illustrated with 980 color and 405 black & white illustrations including portraits of the artist. Text in English. Both volumes are in VERY GOOD CONDITION: complete as issued, covers have some shelfwear, edgewear, volume I has a light spine crease, and volume II has a light spine margin scrape, overall the covers remain solid and bright. Internally a touch of light age, otherwise tight, bright, clean and unmarked. A handsome set.

A wonderfully comprehensive two volume monograph on the art and life of Mihail Chemiakin through 1985. Volume 1 describes the artist's early years in Leningrad (St. Petersburg, Russia), his artistic theories and Metaphysical Synthesism, early drawings, illustrations, ceramics, portraits and photographs; his forced departure for Paris, France and his life and art work there. Volume 2 is dedicated to Chemiakin's series of Transformations, his reinterpretations of existing art forms and themes; and to his first five years in the United States, where he continued to experiment with new techniques and mediums, creating series of works in ink and watercolor, pastel on black paper and large textured paintings. Throughout the two volumes Chemiakin comments extensively on his own work and on the work of his contemporaries, both Russian and European.

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.