Yuri Kuper was born in 1940 in Moscow, Russia. From 1957 to 1963, Kuper studied in the Fine Arts Art department at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. For a while, Kuper was a book designer, working for the publishing house “Jeune Garde”.
In 1972, at the age of thirty-two, Kuper emigrated to Israel. Shortly after, he moved to London, then in 1975 to Paris, France. He received the Colony Yaddo Scholarship which allowed him to study in Saratoga Springs in 1973. In 1974 Kuper published a novel in New York, “Sacred Focus in Moscow. In 1983, he became a British citizen.
His work is known for a mystical, melancholy and transcendental, still life, often constructed with objects found in the painter’s workshop.
Yuri Kuper’s work has been exhibited in more than 50 solo exhibitions in the world’s most prestigious galleries in France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States and Russia. His works are part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, the Staaliche Museen Preusshicher Kulturbesitz in Berlin, and the Achenbach Foundation at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, among d ‘other. In 2008, his paintings were presented at the Bouquinerie de l’Institut, Paris at MWFAF 2008.
He currently lives between Normandy, Paris, and New York.