Pavlo Makov

Biography

In 1988 the Sumy Art Museum acquired three works by Pavlo Makov. That same year he joined the Union of Artists of Ukraine, the professional association of the country’s artists, and a year later he won the Grand Prix at the All-Union Biennial of Easel Graphics in Kaliningrad. In 1991 the Tretyakov Gallery bought four of his prints. He was not yet thirty-five, and his name was already in museum inventories.

He was born on 28 August 1958 in Leningrad, into a family of doctors. When he was five, his parents moved to Ukraine, and he lived in Rivne, Kyiv and Simferopol. He attended art school for three years, but until the eighth grade he was more interested in biology and literature. He studied at a school with an intensive English programme, and later took lessons with a teacher to whom he wrote letters in English from the army.

In 1974 Makov entered the Crimean Art School named after Samokish in Simferopol and graduated in 1979. In 1977–1978 he was an auditor at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad. He then studied in the graphics department of the Kharkiv Art and Industrial Institute and graduated in 1984. For a time he worked as a master printer and taught.

From the early 1990s his works regularly won prizes in graphics competitions. In 1990 he held a scholarship from the Union of Artists of the USSR, in 1993 he received a bronze prize at the International Biennial of Prints and Drawings in Taipei, and in 1994 the Grand Prix at the international graphics and poster exhibition “4 Block” in Kharkiv. Later came a silver prize at “Ibizagrafic” in Spain, awards at triennials in Osaka, Kyiv and Prague, a prize from the Hungarian association of graphic artists in Győr, and grants to work in Washington. In 1994 he became a member of the Royal Society of Painters and Graphic Artists of Great Britain; he is reported to have taught at the Royal College of Art in London in the early 1990s. He is described as a corresponding member of the Academy of Arts of Ukraine from 2006 or 2007, and the exact date is disputed. Since 1992 Makov has made artist’s books, and there are many of them: “Task No. 1” (1994), “The Book of Water” (1994), “Anatomy of the Target” (1998–1999), “The Book of Days” (1999–2000), “Prague Diary”, the “Tin Diaries” series in eleven issues (2000–2004) and “Donrosa” (2006). Many of them belong to the “Utopia” cycle, on which he has worked since 1992. His other graphic cycles are called “Target” and “Gardens”. His exhibition record includes more than a hundred shows abroad and over thirty solo exhibitions.

Makov’s works are held by the Tretyakov Gallery and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the PinchukArtCentre and the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, the Museum of Contemporary Art on Ibiza, the contemporary art centre in Osaka and other collections.

He describes himself as a Ukrainian artist: he lives in Ukraine and works with Ukrainian reality. He compares his situation to that of Catalan artists, but objects to contemporary art being built on folklore. To my mind, this caution explains his graphic work as well: it is constructed as a system, not as an ethnographic gesture. In May 2011 the philosopher Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht visited his studio in Kharkiv. Makov later said that for the first time he had heard someone describe in words what he does: he did not argue with postmodernism, but had been unable to find his own place in it.

The central work of recent years is “Fountain of Exhaustion”. In 2022, at the 59th Venice Biennale, he represented Ukraine with the project “Fountain of Exhaustion. High Water”. The core of the project is an installation of 78 copper funnels in twelve rows, through which water circulates; drawings and photographs are shown alongside. In 2018 Makov was awarded the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine. He lives and works in Kharkiv.