Mikhail Zvyagin

Mikhail Zvyagin was born in 1931 in Leningrad. In 1961, he graduated from the School of Painting of the Valentin Serov Leningrad Art College as a drawing and technical drawing teacher. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Mikhail Zvyagin is one of the oldest artists of the Leningrad/St. Petersburg scene who managed to express a very original view of the period between the early 1960s and the turn of the 21st century. Over more than half a century of his fecund creative life, Zvyagin contributed to nearly every genre of painting, from still life to portrait, from landscape to animalier art, and from genre scenes to eschatological and biblical narratives. The range of his stylistic devices is equally broad: from the sombre realism of his industrial landscapes dating back to the 1960s – early 1970s to pure abstraction. In the 1980s, Mikhail Zvyagin’s painterly language became increasingly more metaphorical, while thematically a special place was being given to grotesque depictions of violence and bacchanalia-like celebrations of monsters drunk on their power. At the turn of the millennium, Mikhail Zvyagin turned to sculpture and cast in bronze some of the scenes he had previously addressed in his paintings.