Mikhail Turovsky

Mykhaylo Turovsky (Ukrainian: Михайло Туровський, also Mikhail Turovsky) is an American and Ukrainian artist-painter, and writer-aphorist.

Mikhail Turovsky was born in 1933 in Kyiv, Ukraine, into the family of Shaul Turovsky, who was a taylor. During the Second World War, although over the draft age, his father volunteered for active duty and was killed in action in 1943. Mikhail was evacuated to Samarkand with his mother and an older brother.

Turovsky returned to Kyiv in 1944 and continued his studies at the Shevchenko State Art School. In 1960 he graduated from the Kyiv Art Institute. He continued his postgraduate studies at the Moscow Academy of Art from 1965 until 1968.

Turovsky commenced a prolific creative career in 1957, participating in numerous exhibitions of Ukrainian art in Kyiv, Moscow, as well as in many traveling exhibitions to Europe and Latin America. In 1962 he became a member of the Union of Artists of USSR.

Mikhail Turovsky forsook his official career for the sake of creative freedom and emigrated with his family to the United States in 1979. The Turovsky family first settled in the Bronx and he resumed his work there. After this, his career developed rapidly, and his international reputation grew as he exhibited in New York, Jerusalem, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Venice, Arles and other cities in Europe.

Mikhail Turovsky's works are in the permanent collections of the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the Yad Vashem Memorial Art Museum in Jerusalem, the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, and the Notre Dame University Art Museum, as well as many public and private collections. His retrospective exhibition was held at the Ukrainian Museum in New York City in 2019-2020.

Among his well-known works are the cycle Holocaust, The End of an Utopia', many nudes, landscapes and still lifes; illustrations to the works of Ivan Franko, Vasyl Stefanyk, Aleksandr Blok, Sholom-Aleichem, Lion Feuchtwanger, Johannes Becher, and many other writers.

In 2008 Turovsky was awarded the title of People's Artist of Ukraine by the President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko.

In 2009 he was voted in as a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Art.