Since 1956, E. Mikhnov-Voitenko, one of the first Soviet artists, began to work in an abstract expressionist manner and soon created an original aesthetics of spontaneous painting.

 “His innovation will be appreciated in a half of a century: they will make an exhibition at the Zimmerli Art Museum in the USA, in the first decade of the 21st century they will publish large catalogs and diaries of the artist, works from the Tube series will appear in the permanent exhibition of the Russian Museum in 2010, and in 2016 will be included in the collection of the Pompidou Center and will be exhibited next to Pollock and Klein, while the work from the collection of the Russian Museum will represent Russian abstraction at the landmark world exhibition in Haus der Kunst Munich “Post-war art between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic. 1945 – 1965,” writes art historian Ekaterina Andreeva.

"Mikhnov-Voitenko: Co-existence" is a retrospective but intimate project, presenting more than twenty works from the period from the 1950s to the 1980s. Graphic works — refined evidence of the author's reflections on the essence of art, artistic gesture and being an artist — are complemented by monumental pictorial manifestations.

Most of the works will be shown in Russia to the general public for the first time: they spent 33 years in Finland, where the artist's personal exhibition was held in the Hagelstam Gallery in 1989, which he began to prepare during his lifetime.