Biography

Yuri Yegorov was one of the most prominent Ukrainian artists of the 2nd half of the 20 century, a classic of Odesa school painting. Yegorov created easel and monumental paintings, drawings, tapestries, ceramics, stained glass and mosaics.

Yuriy Yegorov was born in Stalingrad to a couple of ballet dancers. Romantic musical theater, which flings the human into sublime state, affected the impressionable boy’s identity, defining the personality of the characters of his future works. Influenced by theateras a synthetic art form,Yuriy Yegorov combined different monumental techniques, such as painting, mosaics, and tapestries.

In 1941, Yegorov’s family evacuated to Tashkent and then moved to Krasnoyarsk together with the Odessa Opera and Ballet Theater. In Krasnoyarsk, the future painter met Kyiv artists

Stepan Kirichenko and Zinaida Volkovitskaya, who became his first teachers. They introduced the young man to the world of art and showed him albums of Cézanne, Velazquez, and other painters. When he was 16, the amateur painter joined the Union of Artists of Krasnoyarsk city. Having returned to Odesa in 1946, YuriyYegorov was accepted to the 4th year of the painting department of Odesa Art College, where he studied in the studio of Professor Theophilus Fraerman. In 1948, he entered the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after Repin (USSR Academy of Arts). As a student of the 4th year, he moved to the faculty of monumental painting of the Art- Industrial College named after Mukhina(teachers: Johanson, Rublev, Savin). In 1955,Yegorov moved to Odesa to teach at the Grekov Odessa Art school until 1957. He was the rector of the Odesa Academy of Arts in 1995–1997.

Since the beginning of the 1960s, a group of creative young people, later regarded as the Odesa non-conformist artists, gathered around Yegorov. In fact, Yegorov himself was not a non-conformist artist; however, he strongly helped and supported young artists who have chosen the path of confrontation with the system. It was Yegorov who first spoke about the Odesa school of painting and formed its basic tenets, thus becoming its most prominent representative and theorist.

He participated in numerous domestic and foreign exhibitions of painting, graphics and monumental art. Since 1958, he was a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. He was acknowledged as the Honored Artist of Ukrainian USSR in 1989 and the People’s Artist of Ukraine in 2008.

After the artist’s death in June 2009, a permanent exhibition of his workswas opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Odesa.

In 2018, Yuriy Yegorov`s Fund presented the artist`s personal exhibition in National Art Museum of Ukraine.

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Works in museum collections

Zimmerli Art Museum. New Jersey, USA
Odesa Art Museum. Odesa, Ukraine
Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow, Russia
Art Museum. Mykolaiv, Ukraine
Podolsky Art Gallery, Greenwich
National Art Museum of Ukraine. Kiev, Ukraine