About the artist:
Soviet artist, illustrator, decorator and scenographer.
Yuri Kuper studied at the Moscow Art Academy from 1957 to 1963.
In 1972 he moved to London, then settled in Paris and Normandy, worked for years in New York.
Now Yuri Kuper spends most of his time in Russia, busy as never before, being involved in painting, architectural,
film and theatre, design projects and book illustrations.
His latest book illustrations of "Mozart and Salieri" and "Book of Job" are among the finest examples of
contemporary Livre d’artiste.
Kuper has had over 50 solo exhibitions at the world’s prestigious galleries in France, Switzerland, United
Kingdom, Japan, USA and Russia.
His work features paintings in which everyday objects - such as spoons, tables, brushes and boxes - are
splattered by paint and fixed to monotone backgrounds on found surfaces like scuffed blackboards, rusty metal
sheets and weathered wooden boards. These objects thus appear to emanate out of the voids they float against,
reminding us that there is both comfort and tragedy in faded, familiar objects that might recall childhood,
marriage, or former homes. In this connective state, the viewer becomes as suspended by their own memories
and associations as the objects in the paintings themselves.
Yuri Kuper’s artworks are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, the Staaliche Museen Preusshicher Kulturbesitz, Berlin, and The Achenbach
Foundation at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, among others.
