M. Pishvanova

Artist Statement

“I am a Russian-German artist, born in Leningrad, USSR, what is now Saint-Petersburg.

There, I attended various Soviet institutions. I also spent one year living in Kazakhstan. I finished primary school in Leningrad and was enrolled in the Vera Mukhina Higher School of Art and Design. I successfully graduated as a designer specializing in industrial design sketching.

I was then assigned to work for three years at a factory that produced fabrics and was named in honor of Karl Marx. After this obligatory work, I taught fine arts to children and practiced art independently. I exhibited in Saint-Petersburg and abroad. My works were also acquired by the Peter and Paul Fortress Museum of City History.

My mother was a historian and worked at the State Public Library. Her father, my grandfather Ivan Pishvanov, was a self-taught artist. He came from a family of prominent horse breeders, who before the Russian Revolution owned one of the biggest stud farms in Russia and was a supplier for the court of the Tsar. After the revolution, members of the family immigrated to the United States and Germany, among other countries, while my grandfather stayed in the Soviet Union. He fled repressions and settled in Kazakhstan, where he founded the Union of the Artists.

The USSR was inundated by delirious ideas of communism, and these were constantly hammered into people’s minds. The prevailing atmosphere of dullness was made more hopeless by communist slogans, songs, demos and parades.

Worst of all, because of the Iron Curtain, people couldn’t know any other life. They were told that Westerners were poor and miserable, while life in the USSR was “getting better and better” - as sung in a Soviet song “So Boundless is My Home Country”.

I left Russia in 2013 and moved to Germany, where I live and work on my projects.”

All texts are written by the artist

Edited by Philipp N. Hauser