Nikolay Mukhin

After he finished the frescoes at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow with Yevgeny Nikolayevich Maksimov (Евгений Николаевич Максимов, *1948), he won the competition for the decoration of the Saint Sava Church in Belgrade in 2014.

[3] Mukhin has decorated numerous churches in the US, Malta, Croatia, Serbia, Japan and Russia.

His proposal was described as: "the artist uses a specific iconography which reaches back to the Byzantine and Serbian art and creates compositions which redefine the interior of a modern sacral space".

[5] Among his work for the Sava church he was assigned to design the main Wheel chandelier in the space under the dome.

[7] The mosaic of the dome in the Church of Saint Sava was revealed by Sergey Lavrov during his state visit to Serbia 22.

[8] The high symbolic value of the mosaic decoration was addressed at the same inaugural event by Hilarion (Alfeyev): “The mosaic decoration for the main cathedral of the Serbian Orthodox Church is a gift from Russia and its President, from the Russian artists and the Russian Orthodox Church led by her Patriarch, to the Serbian Orthodoxy.

The main motiv of the four apses are the life of christ with a central figure of the blessing Christ in the eastern apse spanning 17 m. The mosaics are reminiscent of Byzantine works from the 11th and 12th century in Southern Italy (Palermo, Monreale) and Venice.

In the appreciation of his laureate of the State Prize of the Russian Federation, it was stated that Mukhin is One of Russia’s leading monumental artists, icon painter and sculptor, Mr Mukhin essentially revived in Russia the traditions of church art that had been lost during the Soviet period.