The Fellow Countrymen web portal describes Shemyakin as "Man, with a capital M, known in the whole wide world-the Master who proved stronger than the powers-that-be, as they pressured him, to retain a style all his own, and his excellent workmanship".
Estonia's entire artistic milieu had long been looking forward to the present show, says Marina Tee, Russia House manager. The Artists' Guild offered one of its best premises. The HANSAPANK bank assumed all expenses. A great many sponsors came up, and all major media outlets provide an extensive coverage.
The gallery exhibits Shemyakin's best-known cycles-the lithographs "Le Ventre de Paris" and drawings illustrating Vladimir Vysotsky's songs, "The Bird-Men: Angels of Death" and "The St. Petersburg Carnival".
Mikhail Shemyakin did much to arrange the show. It was put on a charitable footing on his insistence, and he is expected to attend the closing gala.
Born in 1943, the artist spent his childhood in Kaliningrad-former Konigsberg, incorporated in the Soviet Union after World War II. He later moved to Leningrad, where he took up the arts and received education to become one of the city's most notable personages. Shemyakin was expelled from the Soviet Union, 1971. One of the principal reasons why he was an undesirable presence in his country was Metaphysical Syntheticism, a cultural-philosophical trend of his invention. As the intellectual artist sees it, there are no ethnic cultures-there is the one and only culture in the world, and we are to discern its innermost roots.
Shemyakin holds several honoured doctorates, in particular, of the University of San Francisco, USA, and of the French-based European Art Academy. He is Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. The artist won Russia's State Prize of 1993, the Presidential Prize of 1997, and St. Petersburg's Petropolis Award for 2001.
