Collection: Igor Galanin Artist Biography and Art Gallery Collection

Igor Galanin was born in Moscow, Russia in 1937. As a successful artist, book illustrator and theatrical designer in the former Soviet Union, he enjoyed professional success and recognition, though without freedom of expression. Yet he had an inner mechanism that understood what freedom was all about. His desire for a career as an artist in the western tradition took him and his young family to Rome. It was there that Igor had his first solo exhibition in 1972. Upon arriving that same year in the United States and he became a citizen in 1983. At first, Igor Galanin had shows in some small and lovely places, for example, an exhibit at the Red Barn Gallery on Fisher's Island. He was then selected to participate in a Young Artist's exhibit in Boston's Rose Museum in 1975. This led to his first New York Group show at Andre Emmerich Gallery and then to a long association with Jean Aberbach (Aberbach Gallery) and LIndsay Findlay (David Findlay Gallery). He has also exhibited throughout the United States, and occasionally in Europe. The art of Igor Galanin is in leading private, corporate, museum and university collections in the United States, Europe, Japan, and South America. 

On the surface, Igor Galanin’s paintings are purely a celebration of the sensual. In this carnival of earthy delights, women with delicate, aristocratic features and round, voluptuous bodies take center stage. Whether they are enjoying a park vista from the comfort of a bench, or flying threw the air on the trapeze, Galanin’s big beautiful women remain serenely in control of their surroundings. Expressing a wholly unique artistic, vision these technically masterful paintings contain lighthearted nods to mannerism, to Surrealism, and to the dainty theatrical caprices of Jean-Antoine Watteau. Galanin’s jewel-box palette and dramatic use of dark backgrounds may bring to mind Russia’s decorative black-lacquer art objects, as well as religious icons.  In his Self Portrait with a Rabbit, the artist appears with his personal guiding spirit and muse-the creature who best personifies playfulness, joy, and eagerness to experience life. Like the rabbit that led Alice down the borrow to Wonderland, Igor Galanin and his muse invite us to journey through layers of poetic meaning into unique, wonderful worlds, no passport required. With a surreal style combining Pop images from the paintings of Richard Lindner and Cubist work of Max Ernst and Marc Chagall.