Mikhail
Shaevich Brusilovsky

Russia • 1931−2016

Thesis in the CVC - a series of prints "Summer", the rating is good. The training took place at the graphic faculty. Awarded the qualifications of the artist-graphics.

Honored Artist of Russia.

 

Born in 1931 in Ukraine, in Kiev.

 

In 1952 he graduated from the Kiev Art School. T.G. Shevchenko. He worked in Moscow at ENEA as a graphic artist.

 

From 1953 to 1959 studied at the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after I.E. Repin at the graphic faculty (the head of the diploma is A.F. Pakhomov). By distribution I went to Sverdlovsk, where I worked in a publishing house and taught at an art school. Since 1968. Brusilovsky - a member of the Union of Artists of Russia, laureate of them. G.S. Mosin (1990), winner of the Award of the Governor of the Sverdlovsk region for outstanding achievements in the field of literature and art (2002).

 

Together with his friend G. Mosin in 1964, M. Brusilovsky wrote the historical monumental canvas “1918th”, which became a phenomenon of Soviet painting and exhibited at the first regional exhibition “The Socialist Urals” at exhibitions in Moscow, Italy and the GDR. The second joint work of artists - the painting "Red commanders of the civil war in the Urals" (1969).

 

M. Brusilovsky worked in various genres: portrait, large multi-figure compositions, still lifes, decorative painting. In portraits, he tried to convey the true essence of man, to create a portrait of his soul. Thus, in the portrait of V. Volovich (1981), Brusilovsky revealed his own ideal of the artist, his own ideas about the aesthetic origins of creativity. Otherwise, the portrait of G. Mosin (1981-85) is resolved, where the artist is depicted in the image of a hunter - a man firmly on his feet. M. Brusilovsky wrote more than 60 self-portraits. As a rule, he turned all his images into the space of the picture, entering into a dialogue with its actors (“In the Studio”, 1965).

 

The image of a woman is central to the work of M. Brusilovsky. A woman for an artist is a symbol of elusive beauty that he seeks to comprehend in each of his canvases. And then, when in the guise of a bull he kidnaps Europe, having transformed with a swan, clings to Leda, seduces Red Riding Hood with a wolf, the elder falls to Susanna’s life-giving beauty. The artist's favorite model is Tatiana’s wife, whose features are recognizable in many of the heroines of M. Brusilovsky’s paintings.

 

The most significant series of works created by the artist on evangelical motifs: “Crucifixion”, “Peter and the Rooster”, “Walking on the Waters”, “Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane”, “Carrying the Cross”, “Running into Egypt”, “The Last Supper” - paintings written in different years, made in the same stylistic manner. With all the spectacular conditional decoration, they are imbued with nervous sensuality and deep dramatic experience.

 

The anti-war cycle created in the 60s embodies the pain of the past war (“Pieta. To the victims of the war”, “The General”, “Auschwitz”, “Requiem”, etc.). The peculiarity of M. Brusilovsky's pictorial thinking is the theatricality and spectacularity of the compositions. Even in the most tragic canvases painting exudes energy of vitality.

 

The main feature of his pictorial works is the sketchiness, lightness, fluidity of the pictorial manner, which creates the feeling of a lively, mobile, transparent environment in which fantastic images are born, legends, emerging from the depths of the subconscious, folk memory and folklore. This gives M. Brusilovsky's painting a shaky, multi-valued, agile character, it is distinguished by a love for complex metamorphoses, unexpected transformations and reflections, it creates a world in which imagination and reality penetrate each other, reincarnate one into the other. The ability for theatrical transformation of history into a legend, a life into a game of imagination, has made the art of the artist one of the most vivid and original in modern Russia.

 

The works of M. Brusilovsky are in museums and private collections in Russia, France, Germany, Austria, England, Israel, Switzerland, and the USA.

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