Mihail Chemiakin (Born 1943) Russian/American, Numbered Color Lithograph. A surreal, abstract work from the Carnival of Saint Petersburg Series. Signed in pencil bottom right. Numbered 168/275 in pencil bottom left. 

Overall Size: 28 1/2 x 28 in. 

Sight Size: 13 1/2 x 12 1/2 in. 

Frame Thickness: 2 1/2 in. 

Mihail Mikhailovich Chemiakin (born 1943), also known as Shemyakin, is a Russian painter, sculptor, and stage designer known for his surrealist art and his rejection of the Soviet-era style of Socialist Realism. Born into a military family in Moscow, he traveled extensively through occupied East Germany as a child, exposing him to a wide range of art styles, and studied at the Ilya Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture but was expelled for denouncing the Socialist Realism style. He became involved with the St. Petersburg Group, a collective of artists who drew inspiration from all over Europe, and developed his aesthetic theory of Metaphysical Synthesism. His politically charged art led to frequent incarcerations and forced institutionalization, and after a confrontation with the KGB in 1971 he was forced to flee the country, living and working in Paris and the United States ever since. He is also a notable stage designer, and his staging of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker has been showing at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre for over 20 years. He has published two books on his art, including the Musee Imaginaire, which applies a palimpsest approach to critical art theory by considering the history of art through unique thematic, stylistic, and iconographic perspectives.

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