Boris Zaborov. Painting Memory.
This is a work around memory that will be presented next spring at the Ferme Ornée de la Maison Caillebotte from May 17 to September 21, 2025.
Born in 1935 in Minsk, into a family of artists, Boris Zaborov left Russia in 1981 and it was in Paris that he produced his work until 2022.
His entire body of work is masterful, far removed from fashions; drawing, painting, engraving, sculpture, ceramics, writing, no discipline is foreign to him, he excels in each of them; he trained in Minsk then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) and at the Suriakov Institute in Moscow.
Far from his native country, he took his memories with him and will never stop carrying out a work of memory that is both personal and universal. His landscapes, his "compositions with people" are the "sign of a time that has suddenly stopped."
The monochrome palette he uses for his very large format painting-drawings allows him to erase physical space, to deliver to us a humanity in transit. References to the history of art are numerous in his works.
His talent has been recognized both by numerous exhibitions in France, Europe, Russia and Japan, through his distinctions as a member of the Academy of Drawing Arts in Florence, Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France, honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Moscow and by his presence in many public and private collections around the world. He was the only living artist whose portrait is presented in the Vasari Room by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence...
In 1989 he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Maison Caillebotte is very pleased to be putting him back in the spotlight this year.
The curatorship of the exhibition Boris Zaborov. Painting Memory has been entrusted to the art historian Pascal Bonafoux who knew him well, notably on the occasion of the exhibition Moi! Self-portraits from the 20th century which he mounted in 2004 at the Luxembourg Museum in Paris and has already published a remarkable monograph on this artist and the exhibition will present the artist's major works through a chronological journey.
