Philip Firsov

Born in Russia to composer parents, Elena Firsova and Dmitri Smirnov I have been living in many parts of the UK since 1991 and hence have a good knowledge of the music world and Russian and English culture.

Travels around Europe have taken me to working in painting, wood carving and bronze casting residencies in Campina, Cucuteni and Bucharest, Romania and working on steel sculpture in Lanciano and marble carving in Pietrasanta, Italy. This allowed me to increase my knowledge of Italian, Romanian, and some knowledge of other languages and history.

Throughout the last six years I have been involved in several small exhibitions in the UK and group shows with St. Martin’s students and Slade students, which culminated in my solo exhibition at the Brunel Museum, followed by a show of Russian Art at the Pushkin House and then exhibitions at the Bloxham Gallery and The Cobden Club. Future engagements include exhibiting work around London every month in 2009 in a new gallery space in Gloucester Road and exhibitions in the Hospital Club, as well as other private venues. I have been making a series of large scale oil paintings over the last years that are many figure compositions of stereotypical eastern European personages arranged in spaces  that are removed from their original contexts (which I have filmed) and replaced into other western locations such as liverpool street station and the Tea building. More recently I have been painting these types of characters in London train station settings taking inspiration from the traditions of Byzantine painting where the lives of saints are illustrated in squares that surround the main effigy of the Archangel Michael or Gabriel etc.  I have tried to transpose the gilding and pictorial language of icons and other techniques such as encaustic and the use of mat against gloss mediums, to try to emulate the objecthood of painting. This is derived from the theories of artists like Kiefer, Tapies and Dubuffet and the ideologies in “allegorical” tarot cards and London pub signs and colloquial expressions. The imagery in the paintings is I hope allegorical of our time; the time of the multicultural immigration of communities that creates contexts for cohesion and attrition, a sense of togetherness and paradoxically lonesome urban isolation. I have tried to combine figures in different groups of proverbial images that show many aspects of quotidian life, and the dualities of “beautiful” and “ugly”, “young and old,” “rich and poor,” “good and bad,” in a kind of dancing holistic pantheon and feast of the gods, derived from the characters filmed in the every day Belliniesque situations both in London and abroad, the composition of which also works in reference to musical scores.