YURI GORBACHEV

Inspired by the brilliant jeweled colors of Byzantine art and by the flowers and culture of Indonesia, the charismatic Russian artist Yuri Gorbachev creates colorful, richly textured canvases saturated with oil and gold and heavily lacquered into a high sheen.

Some of his works are reminiscent of Faberge eggs; not only in their technique but also in the sense they convey of a precious treasure, painstaking in its creation and yet so brazenly calculated to please that it will enrapture even a child. Others bring you into a fabulous, Chagall-like world where animals fix you with loving human eyes, women are plump and irresistible as dumplings, and winter means joy and flowers and sparkles. Each, with virtually no exception, makes you feel good.

Yuri, a cousin of the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, trained as a ceramic artist and philosopher, practiced journalism while attending university, and established a distinguished career as a ceramicist and painter in the Soviet Union. He immigrated to the United States in 1991.

Since that time, Yuri’s whimsical paintings have illustrated Absolut and Stolichnaya vodka advertisements in hundreds of magazines around the world and he has held dozens of solo exhibitions at galleries in the United States, Europe, Indonesia, and the Far East. His work is now represented in the permanent collections of the Louvre, the Kremlin Museum, the Tsarskoye Selo, the United Nations, and more than twenty museums worldwide. Yuri is also represented in the personal collection of the President and Mrs. Bill Clinton.