Boris Fedushin

A fiber artist and painter, Boris Fedushin was born in Richmond, California in 1937 to a family of Russian immigrants who settled in San Francisco after leaving Harbin, China during the Russian Revolution. Fedushin’s early abstract expressionist works reflect the significant impact that Hans Hoffman’s Push and Pull theory had on a nascent community of Bay Area painters in the late 1950s. Later, when Fedushin relocated to New York City, he experimented with fiber art, collage, and three-dimensional painting. His painting style changed over time as he adopted hard-edge techniques in the 1960s, then returned to looser brushwork in large-scale paintings initially composed using a grid of squares. His elaborate, mixed-media hanging and freestanding sculptures indicate the evolution of his approach to painting, particularly the sense of movement and dimension that he strove for in his early oil on canvas works.

During the latter part of his life Fedushin lived between Paris, France and New York City. In New York, he belonged to a dynamic social circle that included international designers, literary figures, playwrights, and artists. His work was collected by Canadian fashion designer Arnold Scaasi, art historian Alfred Neumeyer, and Bay Area artist Jose Ramon Lerma. Fedushin died in Paris in 2017.