Mikhail Gervits is a painter and visual artist working between New York, Athens, and London. Born and trained in St. Petersburg, he studied at the Ioganson Academic Art School — a preparatory institution for the Repin Academy of Fine Arts — absorbing the rigor of the Russian classical tradition from childhood. His family moved to New York, where he continued his art education at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts before earning a BFA in Design from the Rhode Island School of Design.

For close to three decades, Gervits worked at the top of the commercial design world — across agencies and brands including Ogilvy, Nike, RGA, IBM, and Walmart — while pursuing parallel work in animation, video mapping, and large-scale physical installation for the entertainment industry, in New York and internationally. It was a life built on craft, precision, and other people's briefs.

A journey to a Tibetan monastery in North India marked a turning point, followed by an apprenticeship in bespoke construction at an artist residency in Turkey, and further time in London — the beginning of a deliberate unmaking of professional habit. Over three years of travel through Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, Gervits returned to the roots of his training: expressionist painting, worked by hand, without a client.

His current body of work turns that classical foundation toward something more exposed. Working in charcoal, ink line, and oil and acrylic on canvas — often at panoramic or mural scale — Gervits builds gestural, multi-figure compositions that trace an arc from disconnection and denial toward a more essential connection to self, moving through the residue of patriarchal structure and the older, unruly logic of feminine myth. Left unframed, the canvases are hung raw and fraying at the edges, refusing the containment their subject matter is trying to escape.

The work is less interested in resolving the tension between training and instinct than in staying inside it — using academic discipline as a floor to push off from, not a ceiling. The aim is an honesty that only becomes visible once technique stops being the point: an attempt to register, without decoration, what it feels like to be a person, in a body, in the contemporary world.

Gervits' work has sold privately to collectors in the U.S. and abroad. He currently divides his time between New York, Athens, and London.