Alexander Pogrebinsky

 Alla Rogers Gallery is showing oil paintings by Alexander Pogrebinsky, a Ukrainian who immigrated to Cleveland in 1991 and now teaches art at John Carroll University. He is a realist painter whose specialty is portraiture in grand European Tradition, and one cannot look at his work without marveling at Pogrebinsky’s skill with the brush. The exhibition, titled  “Philosophical Realism", features portraits inspired by the thoughts of various European intellectual heavyweights, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s most famous writer. 

Pogrebinsky used his wife, son and daughter as models, placing them in the foreground, in front of a vast sea that is held back by a shallow stone wall on which quotations from the great men have been carved. The walls and everything else in these beautiful works are impeccably well done, so much so that one gets lost in the painting and forgets about the philosophy.

 By Ferdinand Protzman                 
The Washington Post November 5, 1998