Mikhail Mikhailovich Yershov entered the history of Leningrad art of the 1970s as one of the young artists of the “1970s generation”, capable of a critical approach to reality. At the same time, the artist was no stranger to the problems of contemporary Soviet life and its achievements; he was ready to make sculptural and architectural works for public buildings on the theme of the Young Pioneers, sports, and labor exploits; he participated actively in exhibitions of contemporary Leningrad art.
Born into the family of the remarkable painter Mikhail Ivanovich Yershov, he inherited from his father the deep admiration for nature, for nature, which breathes in all his canvases. The sculptor Yershov had to find his own artistic language, to convey his profound admiration for the immutable power of ever-renewing nature. For the artist, its symbol and embodiment was the female figure.
Even his earliest works are characterized by a laconic, generalized and monumental form, outwardly close to the sculpture of distant epochs, but at the same time, successfully mastered by European artists, from the beginning of the twentieth century on. The Archaic has proved to be attractive due to its many qualities, among them the lack of anatomical knowledge, which throughout history has turned sculpture into a bronze cast from nature. Ancient sculptures, which were the objects of cult, preserving a deep connection with sacred vision of the world, struck our contemporaries with a completely different way of plastic thinking, with their immediacy and such a meaningful plastic generalization of form.
Yershov is an artist of a keen spiritual disposition, who throughout his life has reflected on the problems of art of the past and of his time, but most of all on the responsibility that the Creator has entrusted to him who calls himself an artist and dares to collaborate with Him.