Igor Makarevich was born in 1943 in Georgia (USSR). He lived in Tbilisi until 1951, then moved to Moscow, where
he attended the Secondary Art School. In 1962-1968 he studied in the Art department of the Moscow Institute of Cinematography.
In the early 1960s Makarevich met a group of poets and artists whose views significantly influenced his conceptual
evolution. Those were Gennadii Aigi, Eduard Shteinberg, Mikhail Grobman, and Vladimir Piatnitsky. In the early 1970s
he became close with Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin, and later established friendships with Andrei Monastyrsky
and Ilya Kabakov. During those years he and his wife, Elena Elagina, joined the Collective Actions Group and participated
in all its activities. Makarevich’s art combines traditional forms with a poetic mythological outlook, various
intellectual systems, and the most radical strategies of installation art.
In the second half of the 1970s Makarevich created several intellectual photographic series developing the traditions
of European Postmodernist photography. Makarevich’s objects, installations, and photography were shown at
the most radical forums of Russian and Soviet alternative culture. They combine the ideas of spatial persception
of the first Russian avant-garde with the intellectual tension of the Moscow Conceptualist school. His work now
numbers among the largest European and American collections. Makarevich lives and works in Moscow.
