Simun Konstantin

Is a Soviet and American monumental sculptor, artist, member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. In 2005 he was awarded the International Diaghilev Prize For Devotion to Art. Laureate of the IV World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957.

Konstantin Simun was born in Leningrad in 1934. In 1953-1957 he studied at the the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, but he was expelled from the fifth year of programm with the formulation for formalism. Nevertheless, already in 1958 he was awarded the title of a member of the Artists' Union of the USSR. In 1988 he began living and working in the United States, near Boston and Cambridge, in Massachusetts.

The international recognition for the artist was brought by the monument The Broken Ring(1966), erected on the shores of Lake Ladoga in memory of the victims of the blockade. This work has become a landmark and the main leitmotif of his works. Konstantin Simun is one of the members of group of Eleven, which in 1972 and 1976 successfully held its exhibitions in the exhibition hall of the Union of Artists. It should be noted that Konstantin Simun in this group was the only sculptor among the painters.

In his first sculptural works Portrait of a Wife (1959), Woman's Head (1965), Portrait of A. I. Spilchevsky (1967) a restrained laconic form can be traced, later K. Simun began to turn to more sharp and expressive images. The 1960s – 1970s are considered as the period of his bold experiments with unusual for their time materials such as welded iron (Horseman, 1974), bricks (Sailors, 1965), glazed ceramics (Welder, 1970s). The sculptor talentedly used such materials of everyday life as plastic bottles, tires, cardboard, boxes, baseballs in order to embody historical, biblical and mythological subjects in his works. Konstantin Simun was not afraid to mix high and low, and largely due to this, the spirit of play and improvisation can be traced in his sculptures.

In 2005, his sculpture “Brodsky has arrived” was installed in the courtyard of the philological faculty of St. Petersburg University. The sculptor also participated in competitions for the creation of other sculptures in St. Petersburg. Among them is a monument to M.V.Lomonosov (1982), A.A. Akhmatova (1998) and A.D.Sakharov (2002).

Konstantin Simun died in 2019 at the age of 86. After his death in 2019, Tatyana Yurieva, director of the Diaghilev Museum of Contemporary Art at St. Petersburg State University, wrote: “They are leaving one by one. Konstantin Simun died. Talented and ridiculous in his conceptual simplicity, he once told me: You know, like Edgar Poe's - I have almost nothing to say about myself.