Alexander Pogrebinsky

Education
 

Ph.D. in fine art, The Academy of Fine Art of the USSR, Kiev & Moscow, 1978-1984
Kiev State Institute of Fine Art, 1970 – 1976 (6-year degree program culminating in master’s degree)
National Secondary School of Fine Art, Kiev, 1963 – 1970 (studied painting, sculpture, graphics)
 

Artistic activities

Instructor,  CIA(Cleveland Institute of Art)  2003,  name of the course-  traditional realistic still life
Instructor, John Carroll University, 1998 Introduction to Oil Painting,
Art consultant, Dawn Enterprises, Inc., Cleveland, OH 1997
Art director, Graphics 2000, Cleveland OH 1995 –1997



Short biography

American artist.  Working in European traditions, creator of Metaphysical and Philosophical Realism.  Born in Kiev to Piotr Nikolayevich Pogrebinsky (1911-2002) and Liubov Romanovna Solona (1914-1990), both distinguished Kievan artists.  Pogrebinsky expressed his talent at an early age with his drawings and clay sculptures.  In 1963 he joined the only arts high school in the Ukraine, and in 1970 entered the Art Institute of Kiev, from which he graduated in 1976.  There he studied under the Academician Victor Vasilievich Shatalin.  In 1978 he painted Komsomol, which won the First Lenin Prize of the Ukrainian Komsomol.  That year he joined the Union of Artists of the USSR, and the Academy of Arts of the USSR.  In the Academy he studied under Sergei Alexevich Griogriev and Alexei Gritsai.  Since 1976 he worked as an independent artist, producing such masterpieces as the trilogy Let There Be Sunshine (1984), Lenin and Williams (1987), Vroubel (1988), and In Memory of Mikhail Boulgakov (1988). In 1990 Pogrebinsky emigrated to the United States of America.  Among his first most dramatic works to come out of the early 1990s was the philosophical compositions What Is The Truth? (1993) and I Pray For You (1996), through which Pogrebinsky captures the social and intellectual torments of the individual mind in the XX century.  Most notably he has been known for his remarkable portraits, such as the portrait of Catholic Bishop Anthony Pilla (1997), and Father Donald Cozzens (2000).   He was celebrated for his commissioned work of the 150^th Anniversary of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese painting Cathedrals (1997).    In 1998 Pogrebinsky dived deeper into defining Philosophical Realism with the triptych Moon, Earth, and Sun, influenced by Goethe’s Faust.  Pogrebinsky has always been experimenting with the use of light in painting, which is most evident in his still-life works, most noticeably beginning with White Roses (1995) and reaching his visions perfection with Pink Roses (2001), in which light pink roses appear standing hunched in a silver vase, subtly taken in and dematerialized by the white light of the background.  Using these principles of light and object he displayed Le Louvre (2001) at the annual Salon D’Autumn in Paris, France, in which a young woman sits on a Louvre’s courtyard marble bench.   Aside from dramatic Philosophical Realism that governs his compositions and still-lifes, he is also a magnificent landscape artist.   Such works as Serenity (1997), the four-painting cycle Infinity (1993), Sand (2000) and Cypress (2002) contain the same aesthetic and intellectual principles as most of his other works, only with a deeper influence on the beauty of nature and its cosmic harmony.  Throughout most of his work, weather portraiture, landscapes, still-lifes, and watercolors, Pogrebinsky always incorporates the humane and the magnificent, something that is rarely found in most of XX centuries modern art.   In his abstract works, such as Green (1997), there appears the harmony of light and darkness, and spectacular images are caught in the many tones of green and white.  So spectacular, in the words of art critic Ferdinand Protzmann, “that one gets lost in the painting and forgets about the philosophy.”