Busacca Gallery

Large Commission Portrait of ERIC MCDOUGAL, 2008 Oil on canvas, 45 × 37 in. By the artist Valentin Popov. For inquiries regarding Commissioned self-portraits, please contact Busacca Gallery at 415-215-6533. Size and price negotiations are conducted with the gallery and artist. Valentin Popov dedicates a significant portion of the exhibited works to his culture. His art explores the sense of vulnerability and assumed power that an icon elicits, provoking personal introspection. Through his paintings, Popov captures the personality of his subjects, making it an obvious choice to incorporate them into his art. The collection features a variety of images that play with our notions of mythology, eighteenth and nineteenth-century classicism, and secular engravings, presenting them as 'found' items and evidence of the lingering influence of superheroes. 'Ironic Icons: The Art of Valentin Popov' is also a part of numerous museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, and the National Museum of Ukrainian Art.

When he was 11, Popov told his father he didn’t want to have anything to do with art, which was a surprise to Popov Senior, who was the Professor of Art at the Academy of Fine Art in Ukraine. Two years later, Popov attended a fine art school, joined a drawing class, and discovered he liked art after all. He had dismissed the idea when the opportunity had presented itself two years previously, so he was not eligible to join the art class in the 8th Grade. His father stepped up and coached him as he applied himself diligently to art studies, then he took the exam with special permission and passed, spending the next four years in art school. Social Realism was popular at the time. Popov didn’t like it; he became an illustrator instead, with defined interest in printmaking. That was followed by three years of studio work at the Academy. Soon after, he met two Stanford University Professors of Medicine who were visiting Ukraine. Impressed with his work, they invited him to visit them in Stanford. On his first visit to California, he presented his prints to Djerassi Gallery in San Francisco. The director was impressed with the portfolio and Popov became their first Russian artist to exhibit at the gallery (and the director himself purchased two prints for his own home). Juggling his burgeoning art career in two countries simultaneously, Popov traveled back and forth to Ukraine for two years, then decided he wanted to be here all the time and moved to the Bay Area in the late 1980s, where he continued his rise and established himself as a creative force in Western pop culture. Popov has successfully combined classical and modernist traditions in a style distinctly his own. His virtuosity with disparate media is clear in his portraiture, where he captures the true essence of each person, and his repertoire of works ranging from printmaking, social satire, and photorealism. Valentin Popov, a Ukrainian Postwar and contemporary painter born in 1956, has garnered recognition from numerous key galleries and museums, including Modernism. In a historic achievement, Valentin Popov was elected as a member of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, marking him as the first American to receive such an honor. The prestigious diploma was awarded in May 2016 at the America House in Kiev, accompanied by Popov's enlightening talk titled "Artist Career in the USA." He has had many exhibitions over the years and is in the public collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Duke University, and Fine Arts Museums of California, among dozens of other venues.