Boris Mikhailov. Ukrainian diary
The Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov, one of the most influential contemporary artists from Eastern Europe, has been exploring photographic work in social and political subjects for more than fifty years.
Since the 1960s, he has been creating a haunting record of the tumultuous changes in Ukraine that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disastrous consequences of its dissolution. The exhibition brings together more than 800 images drawing on more than twenty of his most important series, up to his most recent work.
Boris Mikhailov. Born in 1938 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and trained as an engineer, is a self-taught photographer. Early in his career, he was given a camera in order to document the state-owned factory where he was employed; he used it to take nude photographs of his wife. He developed them in the factory’s laboratory, and was fired after they were found by KGB agents.
Boris Mikhailov has received many prestigious awards, among them the 2015 Goslar Kaiserring Award, the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize (now the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Award) in 2001 and the Hasselblad Award in 2000. He represented Ukraine at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and again in 2017.
Boris Mikhailov’s work has been exhibited in major international venues, including the Tate Modern in London, MoMA in New York, and more recently, the Berlinische Galerie and C/O Berlin in Berlin, the Pinchuk Art Center in Kyiv, the Sprengel Museum in Hannover and the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden Baden.
