GREGORI MAIOFIS
painter/photographer
www.maiofis-wba.com

Born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia) in 1970, Gregori Maiofis was exposed to many different media and techniques from a very early age through his father, an accomplished Russian illustrator; he began utilizing this knowledge with his first etching at the age of eight. He studied art during high school and at the Sr. Petersburg State Art Academy, as well as spending time in a private workshop under the artist, Ivan Gurin in 1986. Having been forced to leave the academy in 1989 for refusing to conform to strict Soviet state policies that governed what the students were allowed to create, Malofis had ample time to concentrate on his original works which he says are some of his most inspired pieces.

Gregori Maiofis was born in a house built by his grandfather, a respected Leningrad architect and designer of public spaces and Metro stations. Solomon Gregorevich Maiofis' most famous enterprise is Komosomol Square (1957), three seven-story buildings circumscribing a full circle and nicknamed, appropriately, Circle Square. The project was sponsored by a manufacturer of heavy machinery, the Kirov Factory, and the three buildings were intended to house the more than fifty thousand Kirov workers and their families. 'the director of the Kirov Factory must have been impressed with the square; the fundamentality of its circle, the disciplined realism of irs proportions, and the integrity of its simplicity, for the architect was offered his choice of the apartments he himself had designed. He chose one and moved in with his wife and their son, Michael.

The son, Michael Solomonovich Maiofis, became one of the leading graphic artists and book illustrators in Russia. As his father before him had, he graduated from the Repin State Academy of Fine Arts. A year before graduation, in 1962, the first of his illustrations had already been published. It was a children's fairy tale. One day, in 1968, as Solomon the architect was walking through an underground Metro station, he noticed a vendor selling his son's first book. He asked to buy all the available copies, and at that moment, so the story goes, suffered a massive heart attack which killed him right there.

Gregori Maiofis was born into the space which had been created by his architect grandfather. His family had inherited the apartment. From his earliest years Maiofis walked the square and its circle, and read his grandfather's name etched in the marble of the memorial plaque commemorating the completion of Komosomol Square. He was born into an elite milieu, a class privileged financially, with an aesthetic standard constructed by a father who was by that time an established and highly respected artist. Malofis inherited the organizational order accumulated by two generations. His task was to validate that order in his own right.