Artist Profile | Cartoon & Caricature

Borís Ivánov

“I was born on August 14, 1957 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, into a family of military musicians. I arrived in Moscow in 1973. I worked in construction, then in a factory as an artist-designer, in 1989 I graduated from the Moscow art school. In 1992 I started working with outdoor genre compositions with Moscow cityscapes and, of course, with portraits. I started exhibiting when I was a student, my first foreign exhibition was in Australia. For the first time I called my collection "Planet of Fats" in 2000 (it was suggested by Moscow journalist L. Urazova). Today I continue working on this series, the themes of life are inexhaustible. The characters, of course, change externally and internally, it seems to me. I take many topics from life: my time in the navy, studying at music school and everything is enough. I work hard with great pleasure, enjoying the process. During this time I have made more than 3000 paintings. Since 2006 I started making dolls, if you can call them dolls. So that the paintings don't get boring, I put them aside and shape the figures, sculptures and other paintings with a slight grotesqueness, without any anger. I hope that all my works have a good irony and that the fats are just big and kind. My works, naturally, have been shared all over the world. When you work with galleries, you don't know where your work has gone. My works are in the family collections of many Russian politicians and artists such as M. Gorbachev, V. Zhirinovsky, Yu. Luzhkov, I. Kobzon, N. Mikhalkov, O. Tabakov, M. Zakharov, I. Oleynikov, Yu. Stoyanov, A. Kucherena, M. Lesin, E. Malysheva and others. Since 2013 I have been collaborating with I. Myzina's doll gallery "Vakhtanov" in the Central House of Artists and with the gallery “Doll Space”. In addition, I have participated in many projects and exhibitions. Since 2013 I have participated in the international Tishinka doll exhibitions from the "Dolls space" gallery. Together with them I am also exhibited in the Moscow Puppet Theater on Spartakovskaya Street.