Mikhail Shapiro has been living in St Petersburg for all his life. There he graduated from “Mukha” (academy named after Mukhina). There he worked for a long while as an industrial designer. There was a turning point in his life and work in 1991 after his trip to the land of the Covenant. There Mikhail found himself making in one breath a series of paintings, which at a later study turned out to be one single whole divided into numerous fragments. «As if somebody (or Somebody) was moving my hand», - as the artist himself explains this fact. From that moment he became entirely taken up with art work and almost dropped out of  designing business. Places and people he loved became subjects for his pictures: Pushkinskaya street with its inhabitants, cold and forbidden beauty of the Ladoga lakes and enthusiastic fishermen resting there, provincial Ukrainian and Belorussian local plots, and, of course, the artist’s family.

Mikhail is open almost to all genres and artistic approaches. Besides works in oil, which dominate, he also has graphics, caricatures, water colors, still-lives, mystical landscapes, allegories. The artist keenly appreciates typical features of various cultures and characters, and depicts them in his works in a seemingly simple and na?ve manner, but at the same time in depth and with precision. Time and the speed of its flow in different corners of the world are always perceived in his works. In his Ladoga series time freezes, providing the viewers with an opportunity to enjoy a moment of absolute silence and peace. And in a busy Petersburg it undergoes fantastic metamorphoses, here mixing up the artist’s grandsons and great-grandfathers in one story, and there crossing itself and letting Alexander Sergeevitch stroll down his favorite street and lay flowers at his own monument. And there is Mikhail Shapiro looking at this in surprise out of his window and painting the wonders he sees on a canvas...

Alex Fedoseev
Terra Nova magazine