Mikhail Turovsky

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Mikhail Turovsky (born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1933) is an American artist-painter, and writer-aphorist, resident in New York since 1979.

Mikhail Turovsky was born in 1933 in Kyiv. During the Second World War he was evacuated to Samarkand with his mother and an older brother. His father volonteered for active duty even though he over the draft age, and was killed in action in 1943.

Turovsky attended the art school in Samarcand. His classmates included Ilya Kabakov (later a conceptualist artist).

Turovsky returned to Kiev in 1944. He graduated from Kiev Art Institute where he studied under Tetyana Yablonska in 1960. He continued his postgraduate studies at the Moscow Academy of Art from 1965 until 1968. Turovsky commenced a prolific creative career in 1957, participating in numerous exhibitions of Ukrainian art in Kiev, Moscow, as well as in many traveling exhibitions to Europe and Latin America. In 1962 he became a member of the Union of Artists of USSR.

Mikhail Turovsky forsook his official career for the sake of creative freedom and emigrated to the United States in 1979. Turovsky settled in New York and resumed his work there. After that important move his career developed rapidly and his international reputation grew as he exhibited in New York, Jerusalem, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Venice, and other cities in Europe.

Mikhail Turovsky's work is represented in permanent collections of the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kiev, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the Yad Vashem Memorial Art Museum in Jerusalem, the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in New York, and the Notre Dame University Art Museum in Indiana, as well as many public and private collections. Among his well-known works are the cycle Holocaust, illustrations to the works of Sholom-Aleichem, Leon Feuchtwanger, Johannes Becher, Ivan Franko, Vasyl Stefanyk and many other writers.

Turovsky is also the author of a collection of aphorisms- "Itch of Wisdom" (Cicuta Press, 1986) (originally published in Russian as "Зуд Мудрости"). This book is considered influential in its genre in Russian, and many excerps from it were included in the russophone aphoristica anthologies.

He lives and works in New York City. He is the father of the painter and composer Roman Turovsky, and the poet Genya Turovskaya. He is also the brother of sculptor Anatoly Turovsky.

[edit] External Links

http://polyhymnion.org/art/misha

[edit] Bibliography

• Chelsea Art Museum Exhibition Catalogue (introductory essay by Serge Lenczner, NYC, USA)
• NOMI (Noviy Mir Iskusstva 4/45/2005, "Large Bodies: Great Success" by Serge Hollerbach, St. Petersburg, Russia)
• Monograph "MIKHAIL TUROVSKY" (Introductory article by Xavier Xuriguera, text by Serge Lenczner), Editions Sauveur Attard, France
• Catalogue for the retrospective exhibition at the National Art Museum of Ukraine, articles by Robert Morgan, Greg Kopelyan, Dmytro Horbachov)