Yuri Kuper (born 1940)
Yuri Kuper’s work is profoundly linked to time, the passage of time and the marks it leaves on things. He is a member of the Mémoires group, a group of artists formed in the late 1990s. His objects, and the space in which he places them, are weathered, stained and eroded in shades of rusty ochre or ashen black-gray. In them is concentrated the memory of the past, of their lives. Kuper captures the soul of things with great delicacy and sensitivity.
Works of art by artist Yuri Kuper
Biography of artist Yuri Kuper
Yuri Kuper is a Russian artist fascinated by the marks that time leaves on things. He studied at the Moscow Academy of Art. In the late 1960s, he became a member of the USSR Union of Painters and exhibited regularly. He is renowned for his book illustrations and set design skills. In 1970, he designed the sets for Leonid Zorin’s play The Copper Grandmother (dedicated to an episode in Alexander Pushkin’s life) for the Art Theater (MKHAT). The creation was not completed due to opposition from the public authorities of the time. This had a profound effect on him.
Kuper left Russia for Israel in the early 1970s. He then moved to London and Paris. He also spent time in the United States. He was greatly impressed by the freedom, absence of censorship and difference in values of the Western world compared to what he had experienced in Russia.
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