Mikhail Gervits (b. 1976, Leningrad) is a painter working between New York, Athens, and London. The son of an artist and an art historian, he trained from childhood at the Ioganson Academic Art School, the preparatory school of the Repin Academy of Fine Arts, absorbing the rigor of the Russian academic tradition before his family emigrated to New York. There he attended LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1998).

For nearly three decades he worked in design and creative direction for Ogilvy, R/GA, Nike, and Walmart, among others, alongside painting commissions, animation, video mapping, and large-scale installation for the entertainment industry. It was a life built on craft, precision, and other people's briefs.

In 2024 he left commercial practice. Time at a Tibetan monastery in northern India, a residency at ASpace in Alanya, Turkey, and an extended period of travel through Asia, the Middle East, and Europe led him back to painting by hand, without a client, and away from the finish his training had prized, toward expressionism.

His current series, Connection (2026–), consists of gestural multi-figure compositions in charcoal, ink, oil, and acrylic, often at mural scale. The paintings move from isolation and denial toward a more essential connection, to others and to oneself. The canvases are hung unframed, their edges left raw and fraying, refusing the containment their figures are trying to escape.

Gervits doesn't try to resolve the tension between training and instinct. He works inside it, using academic discipline as a floor to push off from, not a ceiling.

Education
Rhode Island School of Design, BFA, 1998
LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, New York
Ioganson Academic Art School, Leningrad

Residencies
ASpace Residency, Alanya, Turkey, 2024–25

Collections
Private collections in New York, Los Angeles, Princeton, London, Alanya, and Moscow