Maxim Kantor
Born in Russia. Lives and works in Europe for more than twenty years. Holds German nationality. A painter, writer and intellectual, he works in the tradition of European figurative painting — expressionist, symbolist, metaphysical realist. His canvases engage the great themes of Western civilisation: war, faith, solitude, the fate of Europe.
His work is held in the permanent collections of the Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the British Museum (London), the Bochum Museum, the Sprengel Museum (Hannover), the Städel (Frankfurt), the South Australian Gallery and others. He has participated in the Venice Biennale — representing Russia at the 47th edition in 1997 with the solo exhibition Criminal Chronicle — and has exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), the Akademie der Künste (Berlin), and major institutions across Europe, the United States and Central Asia.
Site-specific monumental works are installed at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome, the Federal Foreign Office (Berlin), Pembroke College (Oxford), the Chapel of Resurrection at the Luxembourg School of Religion and Society, Église Saint-Merry (Paris), and the Brussels Cathedral.
An Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana) and artist in residence at the Luxembourg School of Religion and Society. His scholarly symposiums — organised in partnership with Oxford, Cambridge, Bamberg and Luxembourg Universities — address the intersections of art, politics and European thought.
Alongside his painting, Kantor is the author of several novels including Textbook of Drawing (2006) and Red Light (2013, translated into French, German and other European languages), and essay collections on art history and political philosophy. As a printmaker in the tradition of the livre d'artiste, he has produced illustrated editions of Kleist, Robin Hood ballads and Faust, and three monumental etching atlases — Wasteland, Metropolis and Vulcanus — acquired by the National Libraries of France, Austria and Luxembourg.
Maxim Kantor lives and works between France and the United Kingdom.