Mikhail Pavlenin

Mikhail was born in 1946 in Perm. In 1977, he graduated from the School of Art History of the Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad. The artist lived and worked in St. Petersburg and died in 2015.

Mikhail Pavlenin devised a very distinctive creative universe populated by bizarre creatures. His characters, ostensibly amusing little people, are nevertheless slightly scary: at times they come across as being afflicted by some horrible disease. Perhaps the painter aimed for this repelling quality, playfully distorting the viewers’ expectations.