Mikhail Chemiakin

Mikhail Shemyakin was born in Moscow in 1943. In 1956 he was admitted to the Art School at the Repin Institute of Arts under the Leningrad Academy of Arts. He was expelled from the school for his failure to meet the norms of the Socialist Realism style. In 1971 Shemyakin was deported from the USSR. The studies of art that started in the 1960s have grown into a collection of images, structured in accordance with technical, historical and philosophical categories. This work resulted in the artist being awarded five honorary doctorates and was used as a foundation for his Institute of Philosophy and Psychology of Art. Since 2009 Mikhail Shemyakin has been organizing exhibitions of the series entitled "The Imaginary Museum of Mikhail Shemyakin. The Anthology of Forms" at the site of his Foundation in Saint Petersburg.

In 2001 Shemyakin presented his version of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" in the Mariinsky Theatre, and in 2005 — a new ballet based on Goffman's tale "The Magic Nut." In 2010 Mikhail Shemyakin staged a new version of Delieb's "Coppelia" ballet for the Lithuanian National Theatre of Opera and Ballet.

Mikhail Shemyakin has been working in a broad range of genres: from drawings to monumental sculpture, theatre, and film. The topics of his work are also quite diverse: from theatre grotesque to metaphysical explorations.

Since 2004 Mikhail Shemyakin has been cooperating with the Imperial Porcelain Works: His sketches were used to design a series of sculptures and a service set dedicated to characters in his ballet performances. New pieces are added regularly to the collection.