Shapiro, Mikhail Matveevich

Born in 1938 in the town of Novozybkov, Bryansk Region, in a Jewish family of a steam engine engineer (father) and a process chemist (mother). ^[2]

During World War II, the family was evacuated to Siberia. Mikhail's father fought and died in 1943 near Vitebsk . Upon returning from the evacuation, the boy became interested in drawing and studied painting at the local House of Pioneers with the artist Pyotr Chernyshevsky. Here, for the first time, his drawings participated in city children's exhibitions. After moving to Gomel , he continued his painting classes at the Palace of Culture of Railway Workers with the artist Boris Zvenigorodsky ^[3] . After graduation, he entered the Leningrad Higher Industrial Art School named after V.I. Mukhina (now St. Petersburg Art and Industry Academy named after A. L. Stieglitz ) to the department of industrial design.

Due to his passion for music and participating in a jazz band as a saxophonist, he started his studies, was expelled from school and drafted into the army. After serving in one of the cities of the Gorky Region, he recovered and, after graduating from a university, was assigned to Novosibirsk , where he spent the next seven years working in the public service, working on his paintings in his spare time from work.

In 1974, Shapiro moved to Moscow and professionally engaged in portraiture. He wrote friends from his circle, the Moscow intelligentsia, famous people in the USSR . He worked mainly in oil, but he also performed pencil drawings, graphics, and watercolors. He joined the Soviet underground avant-garde , exhibited his work in the avant-garde center on 28 Malaya Gruzinskaya Street, which in 1981 became the site of his first solo exhibition. Like many artists, he was condemned by the existing regime, but was recognized by the Russian intellectual elite. Only with the beginning of perestroika, Mikhail Shapiro was recognized by the general public. From 1988 to 1990, his paintings were exhibited at the Moscow Gallery of Modern Art M'ARS .

In 1992, Shapiro emigrated to Canada, where he continued the activities of the artist. Among his works appeared landscapes, animals, flowers, abstract works. The artist’s style of painting is a mixture of realism and abstraction.

Mikhail Shapiro currently writes mostly in oil on canvas. He created a series of portraits of Soviet physicists, including Andrei Sakharov, Lev Landau, Yevgeny Lifshits, Mikhail Leontovich, Igor Tamm, Lev Artsimovich, Abram Ioffe. The author of the portrait of the Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya ; the painting is currently owned by the St. Petersburg Museum of Theater Arts . He created a series of portraits of the most famous artists of the XIX-XX centuries, such as Claude Monet, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Kazimir Malevich and others.

It is regularly exhibited in Canada and the USA.

• Some work

• Chapiro Mikhail (English)
• Galerie Michel-Ange, Montreal, Canada, exposition of Chapiro's paintings
• Painting by Mikhail Shapiro
• Mikhail Shapiro as an outstanding artist