Anatoliy Belkin

Although born in Moscow in 1953, Anatoliy Belkin is known primarily as a St. Petersburg-based media celebrity and keeper of the Leningrad/St. Petersburg cultural memory from the years of underground to the present: not only as a painter and graphic and installation artist, but as a member of the Gazanevsky unofficial art movement and founder of the Sobaka.ru and Veshch.doc magazines. Following professional training at the Leningrad Secondary Art School, Vera Mukhina Higher School of Art and Design, and Repin Academic Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, he still lives and works in St. Petersburg.

Despite his status of contemporary artist, Belkin never renounced traditional artistic values. Palette, composition, technique, and the very process of painting are still of great importance to him. Occasionally he blends painting with collage, using such unusual materials as gigantic leaves of tropical plants. Belkin’s creations are invariably surprising, highly decorative, and intellectually charged.