Rudakov Mikhail Zakharyevich

Mikhail Zakharyevich Rudakov was an artist with a dramatic life story whose work spanned styles from realism to abstraction and minimalism. A graduate of the Kharkiv Art and Industry Institute, he was repressed in 1943 and spent five years in the Vorkuta camps, where he continued to create art. After his rehabilitation in 1957, he moved to Moscow, where he worked as a book illustrator and focused on painting. His works depicting war and camp life are noted for their metaphorical quality, while his later landscapes and portraits are filled with a joy for life and a freshness of perception.