The solo exhibition of Arkady Petrov opens in February 2008 in the Marble Palace of the Russian Museum. The exposition includes more than 70 paintings and sculptures from the collections of the Russian Museum, Moscow private collections and the author’s collection, they were made by the artist in the course of almost forty years and represent the art of Petrov in retrospect. The exhibition was organised in collaboration with the pop/off/art Gallery, Moscow.

Arkady Petrov was born in 1940 in the Gorlovka settlement, Donetsk region. Having spent his childhood years in the remote mining province, in 1957 he moved to Moscow. After graduating from the Art College “In memory of the year 1905”, in 1963-1969 he studied in the Moscow State Art Institute n. a. V. I. Surikov.

In the 1970s his original style became apparent in monumental commissions, whereas the artist’s easel paintings were rarely passed by the official exhibition committees. By the mid-1980s a paradoxical situation had arisen: Petrov was perceived as being one of the key creators of the generation, however, his only solo exhibition in the Soviet period was barely permitted by the authorities. Fame came to the artist at the break of the 1980s – 1990s: he made large format pictures, many of which became an event in the national art world, he took part in significant international exhibitions, museums and collectors abroad acquired his works. Arkady Petrov’s status is strengthened by the large solo exhibitions in the Central House of Artists in Moscow, and also by the expositions, the curators of which were Sergey Soloviev and the artist Oleg Kulik. To the present day Petrov has been continuously evolving in painting and object, remaining, however, true to his selected themes.

The main motifs in Petrov’s art are the life and culture of the Soviet province of the mid-XXth century, more broadly, – the life of “the simple Soviet man” as the particular case of the “little man”, one of the defining traditions in Russian culture. The artist brings new meaning to the stereotypes of Soviet society, looking at them through the prism of kitsch subjects, images of national mass culture – from aniline coloured postcards to the portraits of Alla Pugacheva. Petrov transformed the impersonal aesthetics of kitsch into a gallery of distinctive and deeply perceived human types, at the same time naive and epic, into a unique section of the epoch.

Petrov’s works are held in such collections as the P. Ludwig Museum (Köln, Germany), The Jane Burhuis Zimmerly Museum, The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection, Ratghers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA), The Museum of Modern Art (Seoul, South Korea), in many prominent private collections throughout the world. The Russian Museum became the first museum collection to acquire the artist’s canvases in the 70s, at a time when it was almost totally prohibited to show his works, and is the first to exhibit a comprehensive museum retrospective of Arkady Petrov’s works.