The Byrne Gallery announces its 31st anniversary this year with a celebration and exhibition of vivid oil and enamel paintings of internationally acclaimed artist Yuri Gorbachev.  The Byrne Gallery welcomes Yuri Gorbachev for his 23rd annual exhibition in Middleburg, Virginia.  The Gallery will feature some of his classic paintings along with new works from his 2026 museum tour.  In 2026, he showed at venues in Talin Estonia, Helsinki Finland, Prague Czech Republic, and Berlin Germany as well as Gallery Chang in New York City and Seoul, Korea. 

With over 50 years of art exhibitions worldwide, Yuri Gorbachev has had more than 200 solo exhibitions.  His paintings have been exhibited on the continents of North America, South America, Australia, Asia, Europe and Africa. More than two billion people have seen his magnificent artwork in art galleries, museums, on TV and in hundreds of magazines and newspapers like Elle, GQ, and the New York Times.  Many of these also carried his most famous advertisement for Stolichnaya Vodka.

In addition, Yuri’s work is in the permanent collections of more than thirty museums around the world, including the Louvre Museum, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Russian National Museum of St. Petersburg.  His paintings hung at The White House, have been on exhibit at the United Nations.  Numerous important private collections throughout the world include his paintings and sculpture.

This year a portion of the sales from the exhibition will be donated to the families of Ukraine through The International Rescue Committee (IRC) for Ukrainian Refugees.  This organization is consistently awarded top marks by charity watchdog groups for efficient use of contributions and overall impact.

More about Yuri Gorbachev:

Many local collectors may know that at the age of twenty-seven Yuri Gorbachev became a member of the prestigious Art Union of the former USSR.  Since then, he has established himself as one of Russia’s most distinguished modern painters before he moved to New York in 1991.  Yuri is now a proud and devoted US citizen.

Inspired by the brilliant, jeweled colors of Byzantine art, the works of Faberge, and Russia’s Icon heritage, artist Yuri Gorbachev creates colorful, richly textured canvases in oil and gold leaf.  His personally joyful and meditative artistic world combines memories of his Russian boyhood and the deep tradition of Russian Orthodox Icon painting. His art blends a radiant kaleidoscope of folk celebrations, street fairs, circuses, fairy tales, animals, snowy winter landscapes, and images of the Romanov dynasty.

Since 2011, Yuri’s whimsical paintings have illustrated both Absolut and Stolichnaya Vodka advertisements appearing in hundreds of magazines around the world.  In 2010, the St. Petersburg Museum of Urban Art & Sculpture hosted a major exhibition of his work.  Tens of thousands of Russians, especially young people, attended the exhibit and broke all attendance records for the museum.   In 2011, The Russian National Museum, the most important museum of Russian art worldwide, accepted Gorbachev's major oil painting Tsar Nicholas and his Family into their Permanent Collection. Gorbachev's museum tour continued through 2015, with the National Gallery of Fine Art Plovdiv, Bulgaria; The Kumu Art Museum of Estonia and The Literature Museum of Odessa, Ukraine.  Future exhibitions are scheduled for Major Museums in Kiev, Moscow, St. Petersburg and other European cities, including Helsinki and Monaco.

In 2015, The National Gallery of Armenia obtained a painting from Yuri Gorbachev for their permanent collection.  The Gallery houses one of the most prestigious Russian art collections in the world and includes such artists as Chagall, Malevich, Kandinsky, and Filonov.  The Gallery selected a work entitled Adam and Eve for their permanent collection.  The work was their first acquisition of Russian art in over ten years.  In 2016, Yuri is began his “World Museum Tour” including a recent show of his new collection of works in Odessa, Ukraine. In both 2011 and 2012, Yuri Gorbachev had the honor of being commissioned to design a new label for Stolichnaya Red Vodka.  The Gorbachev-designed label is derived from his painting Four Elements.