biography

Yuri Vassilievitch Titov, was born in 1928 at Strounino (62 miles from Moscow). He was 23 years old when he was graduated with an architecture degree. Married to Helena Stroieva he became famous as an abstract and icon painter. His works from the 60’s and the 70’s testify his opposition against Soviet regime, his large abstract paintings seems to be anachronistic in the middle of the Socialist Realism period. This paintings are followed by a large production of  Christian iconography. After he had been exhibited in Moscow and in the USA he acquired a reputation as a political dissident which led the couple to fled the country, in the early 70’s and settled down in Paris. The migrant condition and the disillusion about the Western society broke his wife who committed suicide by hanging herself in 1975. Then Titov started to lose himself and to go back and forth at the psychiatric hospital. In 1999, Alexei Khvostenko, a sculptor and Russian poet, and Kamil Tchalaev, a composer, decided to make him live in an institution dedicated to elderly persons “Zemgor” where he died in 2017.

In “Zegmor” he started to draw mystic architectural projects and composed what he called “meta-poetry”. The whole is full of communications written in marker or in pen, addressed to his wife and his daughter. According to him, everything is linked “in one same node”. He was considering himself as an architect, creator of projects “mystically real, which could be materialized”. Titov said “there is everything in life, including nothing”. The past few years the Collection de l’Art Brut of Lausanne acquired several works of him.