"Mikhail Gubin is a versatile artist whose work spans sculpture, painting, photography, and collage. Born in the Soviet Union and educated at the Art and Technology College of Zagorsk, Gubin immigrated to the United States in 1989, bringing with him a rich cultural heritage that informs his art. He believes that life itself is a collage, with everyone assembling their experiences and memories in a unique way. This philosophy is evident in his work, which often explores themes of human nature, memory, and the duality of light and darkness. Gubin’s art has been exhibited internationally, and he was awarded the prestigious New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2014".
From the catalog for the exhibition "Layered Narratives. Exploring collage". Florida CraftArt Gallery. St. Petersburg, Florida.
2024

"ONE MAN'S TRASH IS GUBIN'S TREASURE Imagine a gigantic caterpillar processing tons of wooden waste as it slithers through the streets of the big apple. A bug as ravenous as the imagination of Mikhail Gubin, the artist behind a collection of visionary sculptures".
Raúl Pérez Fernández, sculptor. Montevideo, Uruguay
2015

"Amazing work. One of the best bodies of work that I have seen. Your work is like reading an art history book on modernism in sixty seconds, dense with discourse on the history and future of making beautiful things. Bravo".
RB Pruett, Saatchi Online Artist
2014

"What we see on the walls are his cut and pasted abstract artworks on canvas that evoke the density of the city.  The stitched fabric with paint offers an intriguing tactility calling attention to the texture of the work, its bright palette, and the poetry of composition.
Gubin’s two-dimensional black and white works on paper emanate from myriad geometric drawings that are cut out and carefully reassembled. Part Cubist, part Surrealist, these images are best described by the artist as “Similar to the action of our memory– from fragments we reconstruct the past.”
The sculptures are Gubin’s three-dimensional expansions of his two-dimensional canvases. Here the artist pays homage to Pablo Picasso’s practice of making sculptures from used objects. Chiseled wooden pieces are glued together to form elaborate constructions that move between recognizable forms and abstract shapes. These sculptures charge the viewer’s imagination with innumerable possibilities. Central to the artist’s practice is the fact that the material embodies a kind of mythic power energized through its manipulation and placement. Immobile, wooden configurations take on movement and gesture and beckon us to a new world. It is this ability to recycle trash from dumpsters and give life to new contours that imbues Gubin’s work with a sense of gravity and import".
Bansie Vasvani. The Queens Museum of Art
2013

"Hello Mr Mikhail. You are a great artist. You carve a name in the history".
Hitomi Kubota, Facebook

"There is something particularly magnetic and consuming in these bundles of almost-random shapes, shades, lines, planes and textures. I am not sure what it is, but I find them all instantly appealing. Soothing to look at. Beautiful. Not unlike a chaldron from Jonathan Lethem's great novel Chronic City.
If I had a sculpture like that at home I would no doubt just stare at it in a relaxed yet curious fashion for hours at a time... Watch as it changes over the course of the day with the play of light and shadows".
Vintagination blog. http://vintagination.blogspot.com/2013/01/inspiring-mikhail-gubin-and-his-collage.html
2013

"The imagination of Gubin has the shape of a very rare caterpillar that feeds on trash, fattens at every city block it passes, and, after having digested, expels elaborate abstract sculptures. Miniature worlds of wood, paper and acrylic that resemble pulsing cities or the remains of animals that have exploded in the digestive tract of an imaginary slithering creature. Everything from Queens to Manhattan is an enormous goldmine of material for artist Mikhail Gubin, who breathes new life into parts of furniture, abandoned toys and other trash by reassembling the pieces and decorating them with paint and chisel."
Michele Angelini, LanciaTrendVisions.com
2011

"Gubin's sculptures are surprisingly small and intimate in stature, and although they are unassuming in both scale and materials, they somehow achieve a sense of the monumental. Art historical references are woven through the three dimensional compositions - cubism, art brut, art poveda, and more. But these references are assimilated knowingly, and transformed through the obsessive work of the artist's hands into original and personal works. Employing a collage aesthetic, and applying it to time-honored sculptural precepts, the artist removes the bombast from a more typical approach to modernist sculpture and substitutes humility, humor, and in the process, humanity."
Dan Addington, Visual Overture Magazine, Winter issue.
2010

"Gubin really knows how to move paint around: his backgrounds are filled with beautifully scumbled, delicately colored shapes reminiscent of Diebenkorn and de Kooning in their autographic authenticity. Collaged elements are handled with masterly aplomb"
Michael Salcman, RADARFOUR, Baltimore Arts & Culture, Issue 4
2003

"...There's a marvelous still-life on the far back wall of the gallery that alone is reason enough to pay a visit. And there's no doubting the intensely emotional character of such pieces as Mother and Daughter and Romeo and Juliet - though, like Gubin's St. Sebastian and Madonna, the meaning of these images have been so savagely deconstructed that viewers may not even recognize them as traditional icons."
Glenn McNatt, Sun Art Critic, The Baltimore Sun
2003

"It is my usual method to award a top prize to work of art that is brilliantly thought out and well executed. This may seem obvious. What is not obvious is that I usually pick a work of art that may be passed by at first glance. Mikhail Gubin's "A holy Table" was not to be denied: thought it broke many of my expectations of what I would honor, it had a strength that simply startled. The formally heavy row of empty chairs along the collage works top border was challenged by a rush of cut and torn paper images that seemed to fly across the plane of the table. The theme has been well explored from the Renaissance to Warhol. "A Holy Table" is a worthy part of the lineage of works of art that are inspired by The Last Supper"
Barbara O'Brien, Regional Review Coordinator for Art New England and Independent Curator for National Collage Society, Inc. 18th Annual Juried Exhibit 2002 at Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Massachusetts
2002

"His varied pencil markings range from dark and dense to light and loose in a rhythmic flow across the well-covered paper surface, emitting a strong sense of vitality and energy. Each of Gubin's technical choices works to expand the dynamic of his imagery"
Judy Birke, New Heaven Register
2000

"...Gubin exhibits superior ability to convey man's challenges through these strong, if unsettling, visual stories. They offer a welcome truth in reviewing our own role in life's "Big picture" as villain, heroine, onlooker, or victim in our modest galleries. Afterwards, perhaps, the viewer will recognize the need to take precautions in their own lives to respond to these evils with good deeds, rather than just good intentions."
Kimberly B. Koller-Jones, Executive Director Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, Catalogue of an Exhibition
2000

"Mikhail Gubin displays both his why humor and his bold approach to the figure in his vigorous oil on canvas, "Neighbor's Baby", an image of a monstrous, fretful infant clutching a doll like King Kong abducting Fay Wray from The Empire State Building. Of course, this is how everybody's neighbor's brat sound when it throws things around and bawls incessantly, but only Gubin has captured that feeling with such painterly energy. And he is in good company at Allan Stone Gallery"
Ed McCormack, Gallery and Studio
1999

"Neighbor's Baby" by painter Mikhail Gubin, which was named Best in Show at Silvermine Guild Arts center's 50th Anniversary Art of the Northeast USA Show is an emphatic figurative works aspiring to monumentality"
William Zimmer, The New York Times
1999

"Stone was high on his Best in Show pick, "Neighbor's Baby", an oil painting by Mikhail Gubin. "It has a lot of passion, a lot of vibrations for me," Stone said. "The mystery makes the magic..."
Betty Tyler, The Hour
1999

"I look for a lot of things when I jury an exhibition. I look for energy and excitement. That's what makes a work of art survive. I like works of art that create a dialogue that capture you and won't release you. I think you experience art with your gut, not your head"
Allan Stone, Allan Stone Gallery Catalogue Statement of Silvermine Guild Arts Center's 50th Anniversary Art of the Northeast USA Show
1999

"Mikhail Gubin uses the universal elements of art to create a magical language that speaks poetically and wistfully of human experiences, or comments of human behavior with fanciful wit and bits of irony"
Rose Gonnella, The Nantucket Bacon
1996

"...He is a superb colorist, capable of a subtlety and tonal poetry rarely seen in recent figurative art. Yet, it is his talent for concocting peculiar situations and somewhat bizarre permutations of people, animals, and objects that makes his composition so compelling"
Martin Parsons, ARTspeak
1992

"The works of Mikhail Gubin prove that expression and fantasy become bright and impressive only when the artist is well and truly professional. Gubin's work occupies a unique place in which there is synthesis of freedom of expression and feelings and true artistic professionalism"
Ernst Neizvestny, Sculptor, Artist, Philosopher
1992