Mikhail Shvartsman was born in Moscow in 1927. He was made aware of the horrors of the Soviet totalitarian system early on in his life when his father was arrested. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Industrial Art and worked as a designer. In the 1960s he turned to the artistic traditions of the Middle Ages, intrigued by the formal composition of the paintings and their symbolic reference. The artist led a secluded life, and his paintings practically never left his studio. Shvartsman also began to analyze the works of the Russian avant-garde heritage, encountering the questions previously formulated by Malevich, and worked on the same problems. Shvartsman calls his complicated architectonic constructions «hieratures», spaces in which religious thought meets artistic experience. Created on wooden boards as icons, Shvartsman’s hieratures bring together ancient Russian painting traditions, Theosophical notions of the early twentieth century, and mid-twentieth-century magical realism.
Shvartsman lives and works in Moscow.
