Mark Porunin was a Soviet and Kazakh painter whose career was closely tied to the development of the visual arts in northern Kazakhstan. His work was shaped by his early training in Yaroslavl and Leningrad, and by more than three decades spent working in Kazakhstan.

Born in 1933 in Rybinsk, Yaroslavl Region, Porunin was encouraged by his father, Nikolai Vasilyevich Porunin, a schoolteacher, amateur artist and poet. He began attending an art studio at the age of nine, studying first under the repressed artist Mikhail Sokolov and later Boris Belozerov. After studying at a vocational school, his artistic abilities were recognised and he was sent to Leningrad to study at the art school attached to the Repin Institute. He later studied under Professor Yuri Neprintsev at the institute, which subsequently became an academy.

After graduating in 1961, Porunin moved to Tselinograd, where he joined other young artists who had come to Kazakhstan during the Virgin Lands campaign. Together they established a regional branch of the Union of Artists of Kazakhstan. He participated in city, regional, zonal and republican exhibitions, although during his 34 years in Kazakhstan he had only two solo exhibitions, in Tselinograd and Pavlodar.

Porunin's career was also affected by official criticism. At the First Regional Art Exhibition in 1964, he and his fellow Academy graduate Vladimir Kucherovsky were subjected to harsh party criticism. In 1983, he was criticised in a speech by Dinmukhamed Kunaev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan. A jubilee exhibition of Porunin's work that had already been prepared was subsequently banned, and its catalogue was destroyed.

During perestroika, the official attitude toward Porunin changed. In 1989 he was awarded the title Honoured Worker of the Arts of the Kazakh SSR. He returned to Russia in 1995. His works are held in private collections in Israel and Kazakhstan, as well as in the art museums of Astana, Almaty and Pavlodar.

Mark Nikolaevich Porunin