Background
Chapiro was born in the Russian city of Novozybkov, near Belarus, in 1938.
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Mikhail Chapiro
Edit ProfileEducation
After 6 years of studies, he graduated from the Mukhina Institute of Arts and Industrial Design in Leningrad (now Saint St. Petersburg Art and Industry Academy).
Career
Soon thereafter his family moved to the nearby city of Gomel, Belarus, where Chapiro spent most of his childhood. During the German occupation of the western part of Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (1941-1943) Chapiro"s family was evacuated to the eastern part of Russia. Since his early childhood, Chapiro was captivated by painting.
After graduation he was sent for obligatory work (as was practiced in the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics) to the capital of Siberia, the city of Novosibirsk, where he spent 7 years working for the government as a stylist, and in his free time, at nights, working on his paintings.
Like all underground artists, he was prosecuted by the Soviet regime. However, he was recognized by Russian intellectual elite, by scientists, especially physicists, by sportsmen, poets, musicians and artists.
Only with Perestroyka he was recognized by a wider public. From 1988 to 1990 his paintings were exhibited at the Moscow Modern Art Gallery MARS. Chapiro immigrated to Canada from Russia in 1992.
The themes of his paintings are portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, animals, flowers, and abstract works.
The manner of Chapiro"s paintings is a mixture of realism and abstraction. Chapiro paints mainly in oil on canvas. He is an author of portraits of Soviet physicists, such as Andrey Sakharov, Lev Landau, Evgeny Lifshitz, Mikhail Leontovich, Igor Tamm, Lev Artsimovich, Abram Ioffe.
He is an author of a portrait of Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya.
The painting is currently owned by Saint St. Petersburg Museum for Theatre Arts. The portrait of Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich by Chapiro was exhibited at various exhibitions in New York and New Jersey.
Chapiro"s works represented at the Museum of Russian Art in New New York His personal exhibitions are regularly held in Montreal.
His recent exhibition at Galerie Michel-Ange, Montreal, Canada, has included 15 portraits of most famous artists of 19-th and 20-th centuries, such as Claude Monet, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Kazimir Malevich and others
