Pavlo Makov

Pavlo Makov was born in 1958 in Saint Petersburg and lives and works in Kharkiv, Ukraine. He studied at the Crimean Art College in Simferopol from 1974 to 1979, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg between 1977 and 1978, and at the Kharkiv Art and Industrial Institute, where he graduated from the Department of Graphics in 1984. Since the beginning of his career, Makov has developed a distinctive practice centred on graphic art and printmaking, particularly intaglio and etching, while also working with drawing, artist’s books, and installation. His work is characterised by an exceptionally detailed and meticulous approach to the printed image, through which he constructs complex imaginary and urban landscapes. Printmaking remains at the core of Makov’s artistic practice. Working primarily with copper plates and intaglio techniques, he develops intricate compositions populated by architectural structures, streets, gardens, plants, waterways, objects, and other recurring elements. His images often function as forms of personal cartography, transforming real and imagined places into intricate systems that can be read as maps, diagrams, or fragments of fictional cities. Kharkiv and its urban environment have been an important point of reference, although his works frequently move beyond direct representation towards the construction of alternative and imaginary worlds. Throughout his career, Makov has developed a sustained interest in the relationship between the built environment, nature, and systems of organisation. His compositions often bring together architectural and organic elements, creating spaces in which streets, gardens, plants, fountains, and other structures coexist within highly ordered yet enigmatic environments. His use of multiple intaglio processes allows different graphic images to be combined within a single composition, producing dense visual structures in which individual details can be read both independently and as part of a larger system. This approach is evident in works such as *Dandelion* and *Mapa Mundi*, where botanical forms and geographical or architectural structures are brought together to create hybrid landscapes. A recurring concern in Makov’s work is the idea of utopia and the construction of alternative models of space. Between 1992 and 2005, he developed the extensive project *Utopia*, a body of work that explored imagined environments through graphic processes and detailed visual systems. His conception of utopia does not necessarily refer to a distant or idealised future, but can instead be understood through the structures and realities of the present. This interest in imagined systems has continued through subsequent projects, in which maps, architectural plans, gardens, and urban structures become ways of reflecting on how human beings organise and inhabit space. One of Makov’s most significant works is *The Fountain of Exhaustion*, first conceived in Kharkiv in 1995. The work consists of a system of funnels through which water gradually flows from one level to another, becoming increasingly reduced as it passes through the structure. The original concept was connected to the social and civic challenges of rebuilding an independent state, while the work subsequently acquired broader meanings in relation to exhaustion and the depletion of social, political, economic, and cultural resources. The installation was finally realised in its complete form in 2022, when *The Fountain of Exhaustion. Acqua Alta* represented Ukraine at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. At the Venice Biennale, the fountain became the central element of the Ukrainian Pavilion. Conceived almost three decades earlier, the work acquired a new significance in the context of the war in Ukraine and the profound changes experienced by the country and its people. The Biennale described the work as a paradoxical image in which one river flows into another while both are ultimately exhausted and run dry. Its physical process therefore becomes inseparable from the broader questions of depletion and transformation that have accompanied the work throughout its history. Makov has been a member of the Artists’ Union of Ukraine since 1988, the Funen Graphic Workshop in Denmark since 1990, and the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in London since 1994. He became a corresponding member of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine in 2007 and a full member in 2021. His work has been presented extensively in Ukraine and internationally, including at the Osaka Triennale, international print and drawing biennials, the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv, and the National Art Museum of Ukraine. In 2009 he received the Silver Medal of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts, and in 2018 he was awarded the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine. Makov’s works are held in major public collections including the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Library of Congress in Washington, the Contemporary Art and Culture Center in Osaka, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid. Across printmaking, drawing, artist’s books, and installation, his practice continues to develop a highly personal visual language in which architecture, nature, memory, and imagined geography intersect. Through meticulous graphic processes and recurring systems of mapping and organisation, Makov constructs alternative spaces that move between the real and the fictional, the intimate and the collective, and the precise observation of the world and the invention of new ones.