Portrait of Gustaf Mannerheim Painting

Yuriy Matrosov's large scale paintings suggest an imaginary world full of intricate detail, rich colour, and precious objects, which distracts from the grand melancholic view of ruined fantastic cities. Inspired by Paolo Veronese's fifteenth century large-format history paintings, Matrosow depicts majestic architectural settings for creating his dramatic perspectival effects that erase the boundary between image and reality. Populated with a wealth of different creatures, his pictures portrayed calming scenes of all-conquering life. Matrosov uses ruines as a symbol of the past. The rhythm of falling vaults, truncated columns and breaking plinths can be terrifying and beautiful at the same time, like our past. But all is flux, nothing stays still. One empire replaces another, and all we can do is create our future today. This sense of the beauty of present is dominated in both The Landscape with Ruins of the Mythical City (2009) and Ruins with Animals (2012-13), the two largest and most ambitious murals the artist has yet made. He has also made "Underwater city," very large (1×3 m) ceramic panel, and "marine paintings", which shows the destructive side, and beauty of nature. Yuriy Matrosov was born in 1975 in Leningrad, USSR and lives and works in Saint-Petersburg.