13 Facts About Ernst Neizvestny

Ernst Iosifovich Neizvestny was a Russian sculptor, painter, graphic artist, and art philosopher.

Ernst Neizvestny emigrated to the US in 1976 and lived and worked in New York City.

Erik Ernst Neizvestny was born 9 April 1925 in Sverdlovsk into a Jewish family.

Ernst Neizvestny's father was a doctor and his mother was a scientist.

Ernst Neizvestny changed his name to Ernst during this period because the name Erik "sounded childish," but his mother and friends still called him Erik.

In 1947, Ernst Neizvestny was enrolled at the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga.

Ernst Neizvestny continued his education at the Surikov Moscow Art Institute and the Philosophy Department of the Moscow State University.

In November 1962 Ernst Neizvestny was invited to contribute to an exhibition organised by the Moscow Union of Artists.

The reasons are largely political and are described in Albert Leong's bio of Ernst Neizvestny, referred to below.

Ernst Neizvestny worked with Magna Gallery in San Francisco and had a number of shows which were well-attended in the mid to late 1980s.

Several small versions or spinoffs based on the theme were built, but the enormous monumental version that Ernst Neizvestny dreamed to build, inside which people could walk, has not been built although it has been fully conceptualized, planned out and detailed by the artist as a labor of love.

In 1996, Ernst Neizvestny completed his Mask of Sorrow, a 15-metre tall monument to the victims of Soviet purges, situated in Magadan.

In 2004, Ernst Neizvestny became an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts.