Mikhail Serebryakov was born in Volgograd (Soviet Union, now Russia) in 1958. A construction engineer and painter, Serebryakov describes himself as a “real absurdist”. He painted the satirical picture “Diagonale Lösung des Problems” (“Diagonal Solution of the Problem”) on the Berlin Wall. He lives in Moscow.
The painter Mikhail Serebryakov comes from Volgograd, Russia. He studied civil engineering and industrial and urban planning in Volgograd at the same time as learning to paint in a studio for academic painting. He has worked in planning offices and as a cartoonist, caricaturist, and author, as well as a freelance painter. The first exhibition of his artwork in West Berlin was held in 1988. In 1990 the East Side Gallery project organisers asked him to design a picture for the Berlin Wall. His first design showed a man throwing a woman into the air with a hay fork.
In Russian artist Mikhail Serebryakov’s painting “Diagonale Lösung des Problems” (“Diagonal Solution of the Problem”) the positive gesture of a raised thumb is subverted by an element of force: Rather than being voluntarily aloft, the thumb is held in place by a chain. The painting is an ironic comment on life in general and on German unification in particular. Although it was positive, Serebraykov is saying, it had problematic consequences for the lives of the Germans. The painting was almost completely defaced by 2009, when the artist restored it.