Konstantin Simun. From the "Jubilees-2004" series

Konstantin Simun's personal exhibition shows all the stages of the artist's creative development, starting from the 1950s and up to nowadays. The exhibition includes works from the collection of the Russian Museum, as well as works which the artist brought from America. Konstantin Mikhialovich Simun was born in 1934 in Leningrad. He became a student of the I. Y. Repin Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture and studied there in 1953-1957, but was expelled for being a formalist. Simun's sculpture of his Leningrad period was an unordinary phenomenon. Already in his first works Simun showed himself as an artist who knows the laws of sculpture and has a special type of perception - plastic vision. His portraits of the 1950s-1960s have laconic form and artistic modelling. However, the artist was interested in making his sculpture more expressive. Simun was not afraid to experiment with such materials as weld iron, bricks, or slip ceramics. Later, in the 1980s-1960s, not only the form of sculpture, but also the world of Simun's images became more and more original, due to the artist's grotesque worldview, his capacity to see something opposite and even dramatic in every thing. Nowadays, Konstantin Simun works much and effectively in America. One of his latest works is a monument to the St. Petersburg actor, puppeteer, and musician Igor Fokin, which was mounted on a square in Boston, where he performed. This large decorative sculpture (columns of metal net filled with bright plastic cans) had, for several years, been an adornment of De Cordoba Park in Boston. A participant of various shows since 1957, a member of the USSR Union of Artists, Konstantin Simun has lived in the USA since 1988. He regularly takes part in exhibitions organised by the State Russian Museum, such as The Russian Wooden Sculpture of the 20th century, Abstraction in Russia, Twosome, The city and its citizens, and Domestic and Wild. The artist's works can be found in the collections of the State Russian Museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Museum of the City Sculpture (St. Petersburg), A.A.Akhmatova Museum (St. Petersburg) and numerous collections In Russia and abroad.