“To soar up to the sky and cry out to the whole world about its strangeness and imperfection” – this is how Solomon Gershov (1906-1989), artist/graphic artist, representative of the Russian avant-garde, saw the artist’s mission.
Solom Gershov was born in 1906 in Dvinsk (present-day Daugavpils, Latvia) in a family of Jewish origin and died in 1989 in Leningrad.
His creative path is complex and uneven. The period of his formation as an artist is connected with the city of Vitebsk and the famous artistic environment, which was created in this city first by Yehuda Penn, and then by Marc Chagall and Kazimir Malevich. Solomon Gershov is their student. Artistically more receptive to Chagall’s line, less enamored with the radical formalist pursuits of modernism.
In 1922, he moves to Petrograd and again finds himself in an exceptional artistic environment. Here his teacher is Alfred Eberling, he communicates with Pavel Filonov’s circle…
Later, the talented young creator was personally affected by Soviet ideological pressure. There were two exiles – first for three and then for eight years. As a result of repression, the artist’s work of this period is actually completely destroyed.
The artist returned from the second exile in 1956, was rehabilitated and continued his work with new creative energy. He works hard, spends money and is still successful, but mostly abroad. At least in their homeland, they look at them with suspicion. The leitmotif of his work is the feeling of tragedy in life, the plight of the Jewish people, the pain of people repressed by the regime… He often paints separation, funerals, Biblical stories.
Exhibitions of his works are organized in Moscow, Leningrad, Vitebsk, London, Paris, many cities of the United States…
In the 60s, he lived in Tbilisi for some time, had exhibitions, and thanks to this fact, a significant legacy of the artist was accumulated in Georgia.