Grisha Bruskin was born in Moscow in 1945. He attended art school in Moscow and graduated from the Department of Decorative and Applied Arts at the Moscow Textile Institute in 1968. He was quickly accepted into the Soviet Union of Artists but was soon criticized for creating art that was unacceptable by official Soviet standards.
In the early 1980s Bruskin developed an individual style of painting in which characters were depicted in rows and were organized in a manner consistent with the hierarchies of society (Lexicon) or of a text (Alephbet). He drew on the notion of the unlimited multiplication of an image for his work in other artistic genres such as performance art, installations, and object art. His art intersects Conceptualism, Sots Art, and post-Pop Art, incorporating within its scope various social and textual mythologies.
Bruskin entered the international cultural scene in the late 1980s, and at the Sotheby’s art auction in 1988 he commanded prices unprecedented for post-Stalinist art. His work can be seen in many prominent Russian, American, and European art museums: in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and many others. He resides in New York City.
