Pavel Mikushev (Republic of Komi, Russian Federation, 1962) is a leading member of the ethno-futurist movement within visual art, theatre and literature in Russia’s Finno-Ugric republics, constituted in the early 1990s under the motto ‘Leaning on the Past, Working for the Future’. His painting fuses inspiration from various sources – among them archaeological objects in the so-called Permian animal style from ca 800 BC–1200 CE, the ancient art of dot painting still practiced by the original inhabitants of Australia and Russian avant-garde art of the 1920s – into a vibrant and colourful yet cerebral synthesis of the ornamental and the narrative.