SEMYON FAIBISOVICH | THE LITTLE FUNNY PEOPLE FROM THE NEGATIVES CYCLE

Regina Gallery, Moscow

After graduating from the Moscow Architectural Institute in 1972, Semyon Faibisovich began his official career as an architect. This enabled the artist to pursue his underground artistic career in parallel. In 1976, he started showing his paintings in the basements of the Graphic Artists City Committee on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street where, in 1985, his work caught the attention of dealers from New York. Within two years, his paintings were being widely exhibited in the USA and Western Europe and eventually in his native Russia. In 2019 the Tretyakov Gallery was the first museum to hold a major exhibition of his work which coincided with his 70th birthday.

The present lot belongs to the Negatives cycle, created in New York between 1988 and 1990, which mirrors the artist’s strange and novel experiences in America, as seen through a photographic negative. In the painting we can recognise the artist beside Phyllis Kind, his visionary New York dealer.