Vassilievich, Titov Yuri

Russia, 1928

Born in 1928 in Strounino, 100 km from Moscow, Titov Yuri Vassilievitch got his degree as an architect at 23. He married journalist Helena Stroieva and became famous as an abstract painter and iconographer. His works from the 1960s and 70s reflect his opposition to the Soviet regime. After this anachronism regarding the socialist regime, Titov devotes himself to the creation of drawings of a Christian nature. His drawings, showcased in Moscow and then the USA, gave him a reputation as a dissident and at the beginning of the 1970s the couple was forced to leave the country, settling in Paris. His wife was terribly affected by her immigrant status and disillusioned by western society, and this led her to suicide by hanging in 1975. Thus began a long period of misfortune for the artist, marked by stays in psychiatric hospitals. In 1999, Russian sculptor and poet Alexei Khvostenko, together with composer Kamil Tchalaev, managed to have Titov admitted to Zemgor, an asylum where he has been living to this day. From then on, the artist started producing hundreds of projects of a mystical architecture and also composing “meta-poetry”. He considers himself an architect, creator of “mystical-real projects, that could one day materialise”. “Everything exists in life, even nothing”, says the artist.