Mikhail Karasik. The Board of Honour

St Petersburg, 2004. 425 × 330 mm

Board of honour is Karasik’s next step in self-portraiture. Following his enlargements of official documents he now presents a personal portrait gallery of the famous and infamous. In 15 portraits, colour lithographs on primed canvas, he presents people (his parents and grandparent and Etkind, Altman, Chagall, Malevich amongst others) who were crucial to his personal or artistic development. The canvas sheets are bound in paper covered cardboards. On the cover he shows smaller reproductions of the portraits placed in the arcades of Gostini dvor, the merchant galleries along Nevskii Prospect, as was the custom to honour heroes in the bygone Soviet days. The 25 copy edition has a cardboard slipcase upon which an enamelled metal plate has been mounted.