Alzek Misheff was born in Dupnitsa, Bulgaria on October 8th, 1940.
He graduated in Painting in 1966 at the Academy of Fine Arts of Sofia. In 1971, he escaped by foot from his native country to Italy.
Self portrait, 2006, verdigris and tempera, 35×35 cm.
In the book Europa-America – The different avant-gardes published by Franco Maria Ricci in 1976, Achille Bonito Oliva refers to him as one of the thirty most representative artists in Europe. In the 70s he performs live exhibitions in swimming pools, art galleries and theaters (‘Franco Parenti’, Milano) and in public squares (in Pavia and Ferrara).
Among his most famous public events, ‘Music from the Sky’, a live concert in 1979 with four flying balloons — 6 meters diameter each — in Piazza del Duomo, Milan, at Mills College (San Francisco) and near Irvine University (Los Angeles). He gains fame for the project ‘Swimming across the Atlantic’. After twelve exhibitions between Milan and New York, the project is set in the swimming pool of the ‘Queen Elizabeth 2’ in 1982, on the route from London to New York. In 1984 he painted ‘500 young faces’, a series of portraits on paper with names, in five big Italian cities and in Grenoble in 1985. Each portrait is 2×2 meters, handmade and displayed on public billboards anticipating social networks.
At the Venice Biennale in 2000, he performs ‘Proliferating truth of Sentiment’: immersed within a cylindric tank full of water, live playing with ‘Lightning II’ (digital midi controller stick by Don Buchla) while directing ‘The Swimmers’. In May 2005, at Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (PAC – Pavilion of Contemporary Art) in Milan, he performs ‘Concerto per violino Stradivari, pianoforte Disklavier e quartetto di violini telefonini’ with Paganini Prize violinist Eugene Sarbu. At the Venice Biennale in 2007 along with the Italian flute Orchestra, he performs the Biennale closing concert at ‘Spazio Thetis’. For the Council Hall in Acqui Terme (near Alessandria, Italy), he paints in 2013 Orchestra sinfonica II, a 9×3 meters painting, and two years after La festa dell’uva in Ponti (Alessandria province, Italy). Since 2015 he works on four big paintings ‘Country concerts’, featuring New York, Moscow, Milan and Acqui Terme in the background. In 2019, after fifty years, he returns to Bulgaria with the personal exhibition ‘The Newest Small Paintings Of The Swimmer’ in the ‘The Swimming Pool’ gallery, downtown Sofia.
In September 2021, the exhibition ‘Acqui Milano Sofia. A Retrospective Exhibition of Alzek Misheff‘ was held at the ‘National Gallery’ in Sofia.