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November 02, 2007
Artist Dmitri Vrubel seems agitated that his well-known work, an image of Brezhnev and Honecker in a kiss, first painted on the Berlin Wall and later embodied I believe in oil-on-canvas, is the subject of repeated acts of appropriation, as they say. Here for example he compains Once again they've pinched my picture and sold it (in Russian). But... didn't he himself appropriate the image from some press photographer or other?
November 02, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
October 31, 2007
You can get delicacies in Moscow that you would scour Britain for and still not find. For example, fizzy horse's milk. Except they don't write in big letters that it's been carbonated, so, if you're like me, you might swing it around a bit and then open it on a crowded trolleybus...
Two interesting shows: Dmitri Zhilinski retrospective at the Tretyakov Gallery; and young (24?) St Petersburg artist Anya Zhelud at Artstrelka projects (Art Times, in Russian); the latter has already been bought by Igor Markin, Tsereteli collection, Pierre Brochet and other switched-on in-the-know ear-to-the-ground collectors; the former you can't find anything substantial by at any price.
Oleg Kulik has spent the last three months in Tibet. The business side of his career is apparently in the hands of his assistants. Not sure how efficient they are, since they haven't answered my email. An artist friend of mine remembers the then-unknown Kulik in Moscow in the late 80s: he announced that he wanted to become No. 1 and then get out while on top. Maybe he is now fulfilling that ambition. However, his show Veryu wiped the floor with all official projects of the Moscow Biennale in any terms you choose: press attention, visitor numbers, "buzz" or (imo) quality, and the rumour is that Kulik will be back with another, maybe even more grandiose project of this kind.
Talking of grandiose projects, John Varoli has more on the Kabakov extravaganza. This article is a little more cautious than Marat Guelman vis-a-vis the planned world tour.
Next spring expect to see several works by Semion Faibisovich at Sotheby's and Phillips de Pury: tempted out of hiding by the spectacular results this month. Meanwhile, Faibisovich is working towards his first exhibition of paintings in more than a decade, planned for Ridzhina Gallery next year.
Lenta.ru reports on more opposition (in Russian) by leading cultural figures to The Letter. Yesterday I visited one of Russia's most esteemed establishment painters, a member of the Academy of Arts for several decades longer than, for example, Zurab Tsereteli, and he also ventured the opinion that The Letter was an unwarranted presumption. He also stated that this kind of freelance kow-towing (ugodnichestvo) would never have taken place in Soviet times. In fact, opposition to The Letter has united artists who otherwise have absolutely nothing in common.
October 29, 2007
The annual autumn antiques' salon in the Central House of the Artist, of which I caught the last day (Sunday 28th), was a well-attended yet subdued event. Ten years ago, the salon was the highlight of the art-dealing year. Now leading dealers stay away and there was not a single masterpiece on the stands, as far as I could tell (in this respect the salon has been outclassed by the fine arts' fair held at the Manege). The rumbling scandals concerning Scandinavian paintings made over as Russian has taken its toll on collector confidence in the nineteenth-century market. Some official body or other has published an extensive illustrated catalogue of presumed fakes of this kind. I saw one of the listed works, now re-attributed back to its original Danish author, on sale here, at a much lower price than it would have fetched as a "Russian" work.
At the National Centre for Contemporary Art, beginning today, a fairly-hastily convened conference on "taboo" in art: no doubt prompted in part by the recent problems with the Sotsart show in Paris. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Culture is preparing a law on pornography to present to the Duma: there is an apprehension that many contemporary artists may fall foul of this legislation, if passed.
The Exhibition of Prices at art4ru museum (video). And a new Bunin translation.
October 28, 2007
Marat Guelman announces (in Russian) a grandiose 5-venue exhibition by Ilya Kabakov. It will travel from Moscow to the Tate and Pompidou Centre.
Video report (in Russian) from the Sotsart show in Paris.
Apparently a "letter of comfort" has been secured for the Royal Academy show next year.
I missed this (better late than never): The IHT on Russian collectors at Frieze.
October 26, 2007
In the IHT, writer Viktor Erofeev on the Paris Sotsart show, curated by his brother Andrei.
Obviously the issue here is not the pictures, but the fact that the Russian state is undergoing a return to controlled ethics.
The question is, to what extent?
Also in France: Sergei Pugachev has bought the Hediard luxury food firm. The cultural shrinking, of Russia from the West, represented by the Sotsart scandal and the market interpenetration represented by the Hediard deal and Sarkozy's recent talks with Putin seem to me to be ultimately incompatible.
October 20, 2007
Some of the acquisitions of the Pinchuk Museum (substantially, it would seem, from White Cube Gallery, London) may be seen here, in an article entitled Disneyland for Perverted Aesthetes (in Russian). I am toild that Pinchuk, although he is enriching Western gallerists, doesn't always keep the Kiev dealers happy: he's quite capable of bypassing them and going straight to the studios for his purchases. Below: An Ukrainian photo-appreciation of the misty installation by Anthony Gormley, or, How To Promote Contemporary Art In Kiev ;)
The Moscow Times on Gagosian Gallery'sshow in Barvikha. My man-on-the-spot adds:
Yesterday there was an opening of the Larry Gagosian garage sale in what they think is Moscow, i.e. Barvikha Luxury Village. As a bonus, you get an incomparable show of advertising billboards along the road (Thai housekeepers, effective business hypnosis, we are specialists in your rats mosquitos bedbugs, etc).
Gagosian brought things as sexy as you can imagine, of course - if you are into clumsy lesbian threesomes (or were they two?) - a miniscule painting by John Currin. It was sold immediately, I believe. Other highlights included an immense female masturbation piece, two Richard Princes just like any other, two tiny Rushas, two hack Kabakovs, a mirror piece by Douglas Gordon, and more. Maybe they produce all this bullshit on purpose for Arabian and now Russian collectors.
We won't go into the foie-gras (now outlawed in all civilised countries, I believe ;)), the champagne, the VIPs and the chix in micro-skirts. But ("lesbian threesome", "immense female masturbation piece" [I imagine a kind of reclining Buddha with inscrutable smile]) we should certainly congratulate Mr Gagosian and his advisers on their perception that lesbian chic will open wallets in Moscow.
October 20, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
October 18, 2007
In the Daily Telegraph: Boris Yeltsin's daughter doesn't like the winning project for a monument to her father from the Markin Museum competition. It looks a bit of a jumble to me. Markin's projects, in fact, have a certain "hooligan" aspect: I appreciate his apparent allergy to art-world preciousness, and admire his creative attempts to reshape the museum experience, but it's a bit hit-and-miss. Last night, for example, he opened a show which focused the current market value of the works displayed. The idea of a museum addressing market forces is a great one, I think, except that as presented here it was something of a speculative exercise (who knows what these pieces would would fetch in reality?) and tended to trivialise the experience the art (at least, that's my conclusion based on a couple of reports).
October 18, 2007 in Contemporary art, Sculpture|Permalink
October 17, 2007
From trendy mag Wallpaper's review of the Frieze art fair:
If there was one particular piece that stood out for us, it was The Lake, by Russian group Bluesoup at XL Gallery.
It is a good piece, and I actually presented Bluesoup first in London, back in 2004.
October 16, 2007
An extended article (in Russian) in Pravda about the Paris exhibitionscandal. The correspondent who sent me the link says that it revives her memories of Soviet-era criticism, and it certainly is pretty categorical. However, I guess the author might reject that charge, in that he argues against state money for artists such as Blue Noses, Dmitri Vrubel and Monroe, rather than their right to exhibit in the commercial arena. He prays in aid Iosif Brodsky and Susan Sontag against Andrei Erofeev (the exhibition curator) and art-world luminaries Leonid Bazhanov, Ekaterina Degot, Marat Guelman and Maiya Kobakhidze. PS, trivia for what it's worth, I'm told that new Minister of Culture Sokolov wrote his thesis on the history of the piano.
Someone who was there writes of the Phillips de Pury auction: there was "a lack of bids" for the two top lots (Bulatov); Igor Markin was the buyer of works by Svetlana Kopystyanskaya (£57,600) and Ivan Chuikov (£84,000); Olga Sviblova was also buying, presumably works by Boris Mikhailov for the Moscow Museum of Photography (thanks, JV). So, a saner market emerges, perhaps.
UPDATE: I've received a further description of the situation when Bulatov's Perestroika came under the hammer:
Everyone was anxious to see if his work would be as successful as in June. Simon de Pury quickly called out a bid, and then another... and got to about 440,000 pounds, still below the low estimate of 500,000 pounds. He got both these bids by pointing at the floor, but I could not see anyone bidding.
Then began a period of silence that seemed like an eternity. The silence was truly embarassing as Simon de Pury struggled to look for another bidder... But there were none! He kept going around the room, but there were no bidders. There was a slight murmur in the hall. It was clear things were going bad for Phillips, and it seemed certain the lot would not reach its minimum estimate. But, Phillips had guaranteed the whole sale, and obviously the auction house was going to have to pay for the painting, even if it didn't sell... then suddenly a mystery bidder appeared on phone, and pushed lot 10 up to 480,000 pounds...
A much saner market, maybe.
Two big Moscow publishers, Bilingua and NLO (New Literary Observer) are fighting for the rights to unpublished works by Dmitri A. Prigov. Apparently, before his death he gave manuscripts to both firms. (NLO's editor-in-chief is Irina Prokhorova, sister of the super-rich Mikhail Prokhorov, who was notoriously arrested in the Courchevel ski-resort last January; these days he is into contemporary art, both as a collector and a sponsor of shows). Zinovy Zinik is reminded of the widow of Daniel Kharms, who as a refugee in Venezuela, and possibly inspired by the spirit of her late husband, gave the identical rights to several different Moscow publishers.
Dealer Mark Kelner and collector Norton Dodge both love the work of painter Efim Ladyzhenski (inc. video; in Russian).
October 13, 2007
As expected, Erik Bulatov set the pace tonight with prices of £860,000 (for Brezhnev: Soviet Cosmos [below, top]), £557,600 and £412,000. His closest rival was Semyon Faibisovich, whose sun-drenched Soldiers ([below, bottom] hard not to compare and contrast with Alexander Laktionov's diploma work of the late 30s) reached £311,000, and whose two other works here reached £90,000 and £84,000. This was Faibisovich's first outing at auction in recent times; until a few months ago you could buy Soviet-era works for low tens of thousands of dollars, although nothing of the quality of Soldiers was available. Boris Mikhailov's early works sold steadily but unspectacularly; Vinogradov and Dubossarsky did well (prices ranging up to £108,000). Igor Kopystyansky's paintings went unsold one after the other.
October 12, 2007
Another of the works that Minister of Culture Sokolov doesn't want to travel to Paris. An animated gif from the PG Group. How he plans to stop transmission of a gif file is not clear (via Marat Guelman).
October 11, 2007
Russian faces at Frieze, which held its private view yesterday, included XL Gallery, which had a fine work by Oleg Kulik from his series Fears of the White Man and also a variant of the video glasses I mentioned here; and, among the visitors I talked to, Iosif Bakshtein, Alec Lachmann and Ekaterina Degot. Expat Russian Vadim Fishkin had an excellent interactive installation with a gallery based in, I think, Lyublyana. At the Zoo vernissage today, where I have my little "booth", the visitors as above plus Kommersant critic Ira Kulik, London Russian-art gallerist Anya Stonelake, collector Pierre Broche and wife Anna, and various smiling hawkish 'consultants' and dazzling athletic blonde 'collectors'. Tomorrow at the US Embassy cocktails and supper in honour of Ilya Kabakov (why now? why in London?) On Saturday, Phillips de Pury's sale of the John L. Stewart collection.
October 09, 2007
There are some first-class paintings from the 80s in the John L. Stewart collection, being sold on Saturday.
October 08, 2007
According to openexpo.ru (in Russian) the show of Sotsart planned by the Tretyakov Gallery for Paris is meeting opposition in the person of Russian Minister of Culture Alexander Sokolov, who has denounced the Blue Noses' image of kissing policemen, entitled The Age Of Charity, and possibly other "erotic pictures" (collectively,  "pornography") as "a disgrace for Russia". Sokolov has apparently done his best to have the exhibition as a whole cancelled. More here (in Russian). Meanwhile, Damian Hirst's diamond-studded skull, asking price $1 million, will travel to the Hermitage in search (presumably) of a buyer.
October 07, 2007
The Daily Telegraph looks at Moscopolis in the Louis Vuitton store, Paris.
October 07, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
September 28, 2007
The Moscow Times reports on the newly-created Kandinsky Prize.
September 28, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
September 27, 2007
Gagosian Gallery will present a show of modern and contemporary art in the elite suburb of Barvikha from 19 August.
September 27, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
September 25, 2007
Alisher Usmanov apparently paid $72.75 million for the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya collection; I'm not sure even that advance over estimates undermines my theory of Sotheby's noblesse oblige when it comes to the Russian government. But maybe it does.
Plan of Putin, Victory of Russia: maybe it's working? Some friends of mine find it makes more financial sense to live in Moscow, rent an expensive flat and pay low income taxes, than to live in Paris in their own flat and pay high income taxes. Russia's net gain of these brilliant charming and successful folk, and their money.
(In Russian) an interesting discussion of D. A. Prigov and related matters (thanks, IW, or should that be IV?).
September 19, 2007
AES+F at the Istanbul Biennale.
September 19, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
September 18, 2007
A new novel by Andrei Kurkov.
A striking 'ecotower' proposed by Norman Foster for Khanty-Mansiisk.
A new book from Prestel on the Peter and Irene Ludwig collection of modern Russian art. I have an interest, in that my answers to questions set by the editors are printed here, as well as an illustration of a fine Rukhin that I sold to the Ludwigs a few years ago. The collection reflects the breadth of the Ludwigs' taste: some Socialist Realism and Severe Stylet, non-conformism, much 'permitted art' of the 70s and 80s. A few of the acquisitions seem to have been, as my children might put it, 'random': a rich man's whim or acquiescence in the studio of a needy artist, perhaps. But there are also the favourites, Zhilinsky, Nesterova, Nazarenko among them, represented by fine and now scarcely-obtainable works.
 
September 15, 2007
Ukrainian oligarkh Viktor Pinchuk, single-handedly creating his country's museum of contemporary art, is spending loads at White Cube Gallery in London. A major purchase is Anthony Gormley's misty room from his recent Blind Light show, possibly for around £1 million.
An Art and Auction supplement reports that  the New York dealer Chowaiki Mosionzhnik, which partners in Moscow with Andrei Eremin and Mariana Loshak as gallery Shkola, has spent $40,000,000 on jewellery at auction in New York recently. One suspects much of that is intended for Russian clients.
Next big event is Sotheby's sale of the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya collection on 18-19 September. I took part in a conversation yesterday with a big collector and Joanna Vickery in which a final price of $10,000,000 was mooted for Boris Grigorev's Faces of Russia (below).
September 09, 2007
Alex Melamid's 50 Cent (upper). (Darker) shades of Ingres' M. Bertin (lower), perhaps. Melamid tells me that works from his series of rappers have been re-sold for 400-500,000 USD each. Now, after the  clergy in Italy, he plans to paint the Russian oligarchs.
September 08, 2007
Alexei Shulgin and Aristarkh Chernishev's VR glasses.
September 08, 2007 in Contemporary art, Video/film|Permalink
August 30, 2007
On Komar & Melamid's (pdf) (and Dave Soldier's) 'Best' and 'Worst' songs (scroll down about halfway). On the 'worst':
The result is terrible, and yet. . . strangely genuinely aesthetically satisfying.  The reason, I think, is that by combining these unlikely features the composer has stumbled on good material that he would never have found if he had set out to write a good piece ... But the sheer badness of the song is also important here—the context of badness washes away our standard criteria for aesthetic judgements and allows for the unfettered perspective on the material that permits us to see the value of the interesting moments.
August 30, 2007 in Contemporary art, Music|Permalink
Phillips de Pury will sell the perestroika-era collection of Russian art formed by John L. Stewart, of the USA, in a 65-lot sale in London on 13 October, reports Bloomberg. The last PDP contemporary sale broke Russian records.
August 29, 2007
A snap of the midnight banquet on the metro organised by the group Voina.
Update: a whole load more on englishrussia.com.
August 29, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
August 24, 2007
The expert committee of the Bunin literary prizes has resigned en masse after the council of trustees inserted without consultation an extra ten names into the short-list of candidates; no info on which names, but some of them were apparently completely unknown to the expert committee (Lenta.ru, in Russian).
President Putin has sent his congratulations to the annual Russian art festival in Cannes.
August 23, 2007
The group Voina (War), with whom the late Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov was preparing a performance at the time of his heart-attack (he was to have been dragged up 22 floors in a cupboard while reading his poetry), will stage an action in memory of Prigov on 25 August. Entitled Pir (Feast), it will take place on the Moscow metro. The unofficial nature of the project inhibits the publication of details, but photos may be available after the event (info: thanks MR).
August 23, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
August 16, 2007
Tikhon Khrennikov, chairman of the Union of Composers in Stalin's time, has died aged either 94 or 95. Scanning the Google News headlines: Russia Info-Center reports that "Outstanding Russian Composer ... Passes Away" whereas Fox News has "Top Soviet Music Bureaucrat Dies". Khrennikov was a talented youth plucked from "the people" and given a thorough-going musical education. He composed quite a lot, but is principally known as Stalin's appointee as head of the Union of  Composers, a post he held for the staggeringly long period 1948-91.
The exhibition Bonjour Russland, consisting of classic works of Russian and French art drawn from Russian museums, will open in the Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf, on 15 September; in January 2008 it will move to the Royal Academy in London. The show is curated by the Royal Academy's director Norman Rosenthal and is intended to show not only the influence of French on Russian art but how Russian artists, building on French ideas, surpassed them and opened new horizons in European art (RIA Novosty, in Russian).
Evgeni Mitta, who in 1989 together with Aidan Salakhova and Alexander Yakut opened what was probably the first private gallery in Russia, the First Gallery, reminisces (pdf; in Russian). He describes Aidan as the real driving force behind the short-lived gallery. I featured Mitta the painter in my book, Contemporary Russian Art (1989) but he hasn't exhibited since 1996; his design practice was responsible for the successful ArtPlay gallery-restaurant complex.
And another blast from the past: Marat Guelman reproduces a recent (? - or maybe not - I see Yeltsin but not Putin) chef d'oeuvre by Ilya Glazunov with the commentary that he is an "interesting" artist. I find it hard to agree, except insofar as sheer mind-boggling dreadfulness can be, up to a point, interesting. Glazunov's means are banal and his sensibility is low-brow (no-brow?), but he's in-your-face and relentlessly, er, topical; perhaps in Guelman's judgements, as in Charles Saatchi's, the ad-man instinct sometimes gets the upper hand.
Research news from the Costaki Collection. And The Independent looks at the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya collection.
August 10, 2007
Brian Droitcour looks at 15 years of the National Centre for Contemporary Art. I met its director, Leonid Bazhanov, circa 1987, when he was running the Hermitage Association, a perestroika-era attempt to create an institutional basis for contemporary art in Moscow. For a short while, in the early Yeltsin years, Bazhanov even worked as a deputy minister within the Ministry of Culture - a situation reminiscent of Nikolai Punin's brief rule over Soviet culture after the 1917 revolution. But his creation, the NCCA, thrives, as does the associated restaurant, the Club on Brestskaya Street, run by Bazhanov's wife,which is a favourite post-vernissage resort.
August 10, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
August 06, 2007
Brian Droitcour interviews (pdf) Dima Gutov.
August 06, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
August 05, 2007
Lenta.ru reports (in Russian) that most of the exhibits in the Russian pavilion in Venice have been sold. The greatest demand was for works by AES + F and Alexander Ponomarev. Curator Olga Sviblova and director Vasili Tsereteli have been appointed to run the 2009 Biennale.
August 04, 2007
Vedomosti (in Russian) considers the exhibition at Vinzavod marking 15 years of Aidan Gallery: an apparently not-entirely-successful mixture of old and new works by gallery artists.
August 04, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
August 03, 2007
Art Times reports (in Russian) on the Biennale, opening on 5th August in Shiryaevo, a small town on the banks of the Volga. The theme: Our Home, between Europe and Asia. We may wonder at the proliferation of Biennales, but this is the fourth in Shiryaevo and without the Biennale moniker it's unlikely anyone would notice its press releases.
July 27, 2007
The contemporary scene isn't as developed as in Moscow; the State Centre for Contemporary Art, for example, doesn't yet have its own exhibition premises. But it is expanding. There are home-grown galleries, and New York gallerist Anna Frants stages exhibitions here from time to time. The Russian Museum is now a standard second stop for survey shows originating in Moscow. Yesterday a fine retrospective of work by New York emigre Shimon Okshteyn opened in the Marble Palace (Okshteyn's dealer's stand sold out at the recent Art Moscow; price range: around $40,000). Below, a view of Okshteyn's show and also of AES + F's 2007 sculpture The First Rider, sited outside the Marble Palace.
July 20, 2007
Marat Guelman (in Russian) wonders just as I do about the forthcoming show of Russian political art in Paris:
it's interesting that at an exhibition put on by the most official art institution, the Tretyakov, there will be works which weren't allowed through by our glorious customs' service and works which gave rise to a prosecution in connection with "Forbidden Art". This is a typical ambiguity for contemporary art in Russia. It is at once part of the Establishment and part of the Fringe.
Such ambiguities may be found in any society, but in Russia they are currently fairly stark.
July 18, 2007
Prigov's "media opera" Rossiya (Russia). Actually, I'm not sure it needs the second part: the first is perhaps enough (via LiveJournal user aoutien).
July 18, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
July 17, 2007
No news, really. So a dip into the conversations in cyberspace. From LiveJournal user teroganian's blog:
Oleg Kulik's reply to criticism by Mikhail Ryklin of his show I Believe:
Have you read the article by the philosopher Milhail Ryklin about the show "I Believe"? He charges you with conformism, claims that your "artistic optimism" amounts to precisely the absence of problematics, the absence of critical thought and the entertainment-value which state ideology demands of art. What do you say to that?
I say to that: "Mishenka, I really like you, I know you have to make career and write critical articles and adopt some kind of a position. Believe me, you've got it all wrong. The exhibition was made honestly, with a child's outlook. That's hard for you to imagine, you lost it long ago, and maybe never had it. Get rid of your fears and complexes, go and see a therapist, travel to India, meditate, stop looking for enemies where there are none. Look after your wife, children, friends. And call more often."
July 15, 2007
Dmitri Prigov, hospitalised following a heart attack, has died, reports Lenta.ru.
I met Prigov in the 80s and bought a drawing from him that I still have, a melancholy satirical image of Mikhail Gorbachev drawn in ink on newspaper. Some years after the collapse of the Soviet Union he moved to England and set up home in Stanmore on the outskirts of London. Here his wife, his son Andrei and Andrei's family lived, and here he too was based, when not shuttling to Moscow and around the world. He observed a rigorous, almost monastic regime: the day was divided into the hours for writing and the hours for drawing, with a nap between; he worked deep into the night. When he relaxed, he smoked and drank beer. I saw him read his poetry in London last year, at a gathering of British musicians and writers. "Perform" is a better description than "read": sitting at a table, he delivered his work in a sonorous dramatic fashion, sometimes almost shouting, sometimes almost singing. It was a compelling experience even to the bulk of the audience, which was non-Russian-speaking.
His website (all in Russian) is here.
 
July 15, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
July 14, 2007
I am in Berlin to confirm an exhibition of work by Boris Mikhailov, which will open in my gallery on September 12. Boris will show photographs taken in Japan in February this year. It will be his first solo show in the UK since exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery and Tate a few years ago. 
Berlin has its expat Russian artist community (among them Mikhailov, Zhenya Shef, Avdei Ter-Oganyan, Natalia Mali, Ilya Kitup, Marina Gertsovskaya, Marina Serebryakova, Sergei Vorontsov and Igor Kopystyansky), and a few Russian-owned or Russian-interested galleries. Some are clustered on Auguststrasse, among them Bereznitsky Gallery, currently showing Masha Shubina (first below); IFA Gallery, which has an exhibition of work by Russian architects accompanied by photos by Natalia Mali (second below); and Sandmann Gallery, currently showing kitsch-aware work by Aleksandra Koneva (third below).
July 14, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
July 12, 2007
Work by Igor Guelman-Zak in the show Objects of Art, which opened at my gallery last night. The vernissage overflowed and dozens of people sat on the stairs or stood in the street.
July 12, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
July 10, 2007
First Deputy Mayor of Moscow Vladimir Resin has ordered the removal of publicity banners advertising exhibitions by contemporary artists Oleg Kulik, AES+F, Vinogradov and Dubossarsky. No explanation of what precisely offended Mr Resin, but Gif.ru likens the event to Khrushchev's stormy visit to the Manege in 1962 when he bawled out several of the younger exhibitors (Gif.ru, in Russian)
July 09, 2007
Igor Markin writes (in Russian; via LiveJournal user Dmitri Vrubel) of his recently-opened museum:
I am often asked
do people visit the museum?
At the moment
on average 50 a day
but that's not enough
200 are needed to cover costs and make the project successful
if we don't get them - we'll shut the bugger down
not immediately of course
in a couple of years.
Markin's museum is an excellent institution: well-located, unstuffy, full of fine things. A glorious project but no doubt an onerous commitment.
July 07, 2007
The artist and poet Dmitri Prigov is in intensive care in Moscow after a heart attack in the metro in the early hours of this morning.
July 07, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
Vernissage TV has a thorough video report from the Russian pavilion in Venice. The AES+F movie installation that features in the first part of the report is one of the best-received works at the Biennale.
July 06, 2007
80 documents, including some bearing the signatures of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Khrushchev, stolen in the nineties as part of a haul of 4000 documents by the "so-called Fainberg Gang", mostly from the Russian State Historical Archive in St Petersburg, have been returned from the USA to Russia (Lenta.ru, in Russian).
The Kandinsky Prize for contemporary art, described as an analogue to the UK's Turner Prize, has been founded in Russia by ArtKhronika magazine and Deutsche Bank; the prime-mover is reported to be Nikolai Ilin, who works as "director of corporate development" for the Guggenheim Museum. Prizes will go to best artist (40,000 euros), best young artist (3 months' trip to Florence), best media-art project (5,000 euros), and the people's choice prize (5,000 euros). British star Anish Kapoor will chair the jury. (Lenta.ru and Gazeta.ru, in Russian).
July 03, 2007
A website I've never come across before, Art Boobs, links to Boris Mikhailov's show at kunst Meran/Merano arte.
A law is being discussed (pdf) in the Duma that would control erotic publications. It is quite conceivable, considering confiscations and prosecutions in recent years, that such a law would impact on art.
'Relations between man and woman have always been a source of inspiration for artists, writers, musicians. And if the prohibitive law is worded in a way allowing of double interpretation, it may turn into an instrument of censure and control over art - which is inadmissible, of course', [Boruh] Gorin [director of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia] stressed.
June 29, 2007
Brian Droitcour on Oleg Kulik (pdf) (my photo-survey here).
June 28, 2007
The spoof and the truth.
June 26, 2007
The opening carried on after midnight. The entire cavernous interior of the Central House of the Artist is draped in polythene in shades of grey and silver; it creates the effect of a futuristic funeral home for the laying-out of giants. The show is a mixture of 3d-objects, photoworks and films produced over 20 years or so; it well illustrates the dichotomy in Kulik's persona, between the crazy and the aesthete. The early performance videos look very convincing: more so, perhaps, than when they first appeared and were shown (in the UK) on a TV programme specialising in Eurotrash; many of the photoworks are beautiful, although to my mind they struggle a little in the huge grey ambience. An absorbing show. Photos below (the two views of "Anna Kournikova" will satisfy, I hope, all but the most intrepid curiosity; the chap covered in guano is Leo Tolstoy).
June 25, 2007
Opening tonight, at 10 pm I understand, the Oleg Kulik retrospective at Central House of the Artist. The first time in my memory that the whole vast building has been devoted to a single artist.
June 24, 2007
Paul Abelsky in Russia Profile takes a thoughtful look at the Sakharov Museum's Forbidden Art show (registration required) (pdf) and the events and issues surrounding it.
“In Russia the fighting is rougher, tougher and dirtier, but the debates themselves are not unique to Russia,” Bown said. “ Also, I think it’s wrong to assume that the Russian bureaucracy is monolithic in its attitudes. There’s clearly a difference of opinion between the Ministry of Culture, which provides export licenses and museum wall-space for the Blue Noses and others, and the Customs’ authority and FSB, which holds up and confiscates their work.”
June 23, 2007
Fantastic Phillips de Pury Russian contemporary results: all in pounds sterling (US dollars = x2):
Ilya Kabakov: 2.036 million
Erik Bulatov: 916,000
Evgeni Chubarov: 692,000
Komar and Melamid: 156,000
Natalya Nesterova: 66,000
Dubosarsky and Vinogradov: 135,000
June 21, 2007
Auction house Phillips de Pury includes several contemporary Russian artists in its London sale tomorrow: Ilya Kabakov (lot 9), Erik Bulatov (17), Evgeni Chubarov (18), Komar and Melamid (19), Natalya Nesterova (53), Dubissarsky and Vinogradov (65). Russian eyes will be on Chubarov, to see whether he can repeat his price in London in February, but above all on Kabakov, who failed last time out at Sotheby's.
June 19, 2007
Kommersantreports on Roman Abramovich's visit to the Venice Biennale; below, Olga Sviblova giving directions to a tourist in the Giardini.
June 18, 2007
Anatoli Osmolovsky's Bread at Kassel; this work was first seen at Veryu.
Waldemar Januszczak presents a video tour (.mov) of the Venice Biennale, including a visit to the Russian pavilion (you have to sit through Tracy Emin to get there).
June 16, 2007
The ever-more impressive Art Times site now has my guest column on the London auctions (in Russian). But that's not all that makes it more impressive! It also has a thorough survey of the Russian pavilion in Venice: video interviews with Viktor Misiano and Oleg Kulik as well as a view of AES's and Ponomarev's installations, all currently on its front page here (in Russian; videos in r/h column). Btw, the AES installation has been very well-received by the UK press. And as I write Art Times's intrepid and indefatigable journalists are in the air on their way to Kassel to record Documenta (see preview images below).
Work by Dima Gutov and Anatoli Osmolovsky at Documenta, which has just opened.
June 16, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
June 15, 2007
A criminal inquiry has been opened against the organisers of the show Forbidden Art, staged in the Sakharov Centre, Moscow, last year; see The International Herald Tribune or the BBC (in Russian).
RIA Novosti reports on negotiations for the return of the artworks removed by Captain Baldin from Germany in 1945. Apparently a favoured idea now is for the works to go back in return for a 'storage charge' of 2 million euros. Not bad: over the period 1945-2007 that equates to more than 32,000 euros a year for the space under Captain Baldin's bed... ;)
Finally, a couple of old geezers, er, I mean, geniuses. Alexander Solzhenitsyn getting the State Prize from President Putin (via LJ user dmitrivrubel), and Boris Mikhailov in the Ukrainian pavilion, Venice.
June 09, 2007
Venice: The Times on Russians in Venice. Artnet considers the Russian contribution to the Biennale, among others. Thisislondon.com looks at the Ukrainian pavilion. And BYM Product and Industry News talks about the folk sponsoring Alexander Ponomarev.
Also: The Sidney Morning Herald on the Chiparus-lovers.
June 08, 2007
Attraction of the evening at the opening of the Russian pavilion last night was Andrei Bartenev, who attended in swimsuit, masky-thing and high-heels.
Brian Droitcour in The Moscow Times has a look at the show (pdf; in English), as does Art Times (pdf; in Russian) with photos of the opening. Below, Bartenev ((c) Art Times).
June 07, 2007
Georg Baselitz is showing his series of Russian paintings, evoking a childhood in communist East Germany, in Seoul. Below: his version of Korzhev's In Days Of War.
June 07, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
Artnet.com looks at Art Athina, including two shows of Russian art curated by Viktor Misiano.
June 07, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
June 06, 2007
Among the important events of the last week or so was the re-hang of twentieth-century work in the Tretyakov Gallery. I haven't seen it, but below a photo from the vernissage: Andrey Anisenko and artist Alexei Sundukov in front of Sundukov's  In Front Of The Painting, a classic work of the perestroika era.
June 03, 2007
The Igor Markin museum has been open to the public since 1 June. It's well-located, in Khlynovski Pereulok, adjacent to a number of bohemian and fashionable cafes, on the ground floor of a fairly grand building. The opening show gives the sense of a collection which ranges both wide and deep: a lot of different artists, also multiple works by individual artists. It's hung pretty tightly, and the works are unlabelled, apparently to encourage visitors to vote for the favourite and least-favourite works without prejudice. Markin's enthusiasm for his collector's task is apparent, and there are plenty of fine pieces. Yes, there are (in my opinion) omissions, but, crucially, Markin seems to have understood and been guided by a sense of the capacity of his collection to assume historic importance. Under the cut, a selection of snapshots: I haven't got the artist's name in every instance, and may have got one or two wrong.
June 02, 2007
On the plane to Moscow yesterday I read, in Aeroflot inflight magazine, that the St Petersburg governor Valentin Matvienko has asked for the inclusion of a museum of contemporary art in the plans for the huge Okhta Centre development. It would be interesting to know who bent the governor's ear. Designed by London's RMJM architects, the focal-point of the Okhta Centre plan is a 396 metre tower, its cross-section a 5-pointed star which rotates through one degree on each floor (not, it is claimed, an inspiration from Soviet iconography but from the design of a Swedish fortress that once stood on the site); its height is apparently limited so that it is invisible from the main section of Nevsky Prospect and other key parts of old St Petersburg.
May 28, 2007
With the recent death of the German painter Jorg Immendorf, the title of "Last Marxist Artist" surely passes to Dima Gutov. Gutov's project for the Arsenale at the upcoming Venice Biennale may be viewed on Art Times (in Russian; scroll down).
May 27, 2007
Viketz has images of Igor Markin's museum in the run-up to his grand opening in 4 days' time. Judging by the catalogue, Markin's promises to be the major private initiative in the contemporary art world: the depth and breadth of his collection outstrips everyone else's, as far as I know. Having said which, the big red sculpture on the floor here, apparently Rostislav Lebedev's Made In The USSR (SDELANO V SSSR) is a recent re-make, which I know as I have the original. It's a shame when artists do that...
May 26, 2007
Unashamed naked pr:
Guns and knifes, gay men with panama hats, sadomasochistic games and  a scary transsexual ghost - that's just some of the entertainment you will find inside Episodes Vol. II, the new volume of photo stories by  Latvian photography and video artist Arnis Balcus.
It is a box-set of four photo stories - East London Boys, A Ghost From Last Autumn, Get The Package and How To Kill Your Father that explore the world of men in thrilling plots laced with sex and  violence and set in East London and Kent.
Arnis, who lives in London, shows with me in London, with Riga Gallery, and in Berlin. He's immersed himself, very successfully, in British "trash" culture. He's one of the artists making the whole East-West art-dichotomy redundant. You can visit his site and buy the books. Below: a couple of stills from A Ghost From Last Autumn.
May 26, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
May 23, 2007
A show looking at the work of Konstantin M. Maximov opens in Beijing on May 28.
Satirical works have again been detained by Moscow customs (also here, with image)
Marat Guelman Gallery is now the Marat and Julia Guelman Gallery.
May 22, 2007
The Moscow Times looks at the collection of Pierre Brochet (pdf). Brochet has played an important role in encouraging the expat community in Moscow to collect contemporary art. Judging by the catalogue, his collection contains several fine works. Yet I can't help feeling a little disappointed. If one takes into account how early he began collecting (1989), there is to my mind a dearth of masterpieces and also omissions of major artists. Now, of course, those artists and masterpieces are expensive (the last time I asked an editioned piece by Alexander Brodsky, for example, had sold out at $50,000 a time). But during the nineties they weren't so very expensive. I can only speculate either that Brochet was constrained by some kind of self-imposed per-piece financial limit, or that he failed to appreciate that he was in a position to create a historic collection: a failure of the pocket or of the vision. Of course, it's easy to find fault in retrospect, and as a dealer I have made analogous mistakes - in my case, failing to realise how the market would develop and selling fantastic works far too cheaply - on innumerable occasions.
May 20, 2007
Sasha Petrelli, alias "The Pocket" (Karman), alias The Overcoat Gallery (Galereya "Palto") displays his latest show: Slaughter in Shargorod: photographs by Sergei Bratkov documenting a vicious fight at an art exhibition in Shargorod. Below that, Petrelli relaxes in a Caucasian dive by Kursk station. I've no idea what he's trying to convey.
May 20, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
More images, in order as below:
- Sergei Bazilev on Art Strelka stand (Bazilev sold several paintings to the Tretyakov Gallery from the recent hyper-realism show in Moscow, and has a show coming up in London with Alla Bulyanskaya)
- Julia Bochkova aka Milner, the artist who is presenting Click I Hope at the Russian pavilion in Venice; I suspended judgement until I saw, and now I see, I see that it is pretty far-fetched to argue, on this basis of these works, that she merits a place in Venice.
- Semyon Faibisovich, one of his "negative" paintings circa 1990.
- Evgeni Gorokhovski, work from early 1990s, from the Alexander Smuzikov collection, a special presentation at Art Moscow.
- Inside the Kommunalka Reality Show. As far as I can see anyobody could walk in and out. Far from being a "deconstruction" of TV reality shows, it's a slack parody.
- Georghi Puzenkov, Lara Croft.
- Irina Zatulovskaya on Kaj Forsblum stand (background: Markus Lupertz). UPDATE: this painting has been sold to the Guggenheim Museum for in excess of €10,000.
May 20, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
May 17, 2007
Overall: an influx of foreign galleries, mostly (with the notable exception of Kai Forsblum, Helsinki, who has a mass of international masters: Baselitz, Sultan, Lupertz and others) showing shiny commercial art which isn't garnering much attention. The Russian galleries are more interesting. Best stand, in my view: Guelman Gallery, whose show is more inventive varied and subtle than much of the rest.
Images from the fair. In descending order:
Aidan Gallery stand
Arnis Balcus on Riga Gallery stand
Alexander Brodsky on Guelman Gallery stand
Andrei Filippov (work from 1989) on E K Artbureau stand
Dima Gutov on Guelman Gallery stand
Kommunalka project: Sergei Shutov
Masha Shubina on Fine Art Gallery stand
Shimon Okshtein, New York-based artist of Russian origin (can't remember gallery)
May 14, 2007
A performance made by Natalia Mali at Subterfuge, a venue in Manchester, recently. She is from Dagestan but here actually looks authentically British: like a holidaymaker on the Costa Brava spoiling for a punch-up.
May 14, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
May 13, 2007
ArtTimespreviews (in Russian) one of the more piquant projects for the upcoming ArtMoscow fair (16-19 May). Kommunalka (Communal Flat) puts seven artists (their names haven't been announced) into a single living working and sleeping environment in a "reality show" for artists. A jury of "strong women" will decide who stays and who gets ejected. Hmmm. The more I think about it the more frivolous it seems.
May 13, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
The Daily Telegraphprofiles (pdf-1, pdf-2, pdf-3) Olga Sviblova. She's an extraordinary achiever, although it is a gush or two too far to attribute to her efforts the reputations of Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov, as this writer does. Photo below from a further (Russian-language) interview with Sviblova in Art Times.
May 09, 2007
Natasha Lyakh and Natalia Mali.
May 09, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
May 07, 2007
Russia-ic.com reports that the Alexei Shchusev-designed Russian Pavilion in Venice will be repaired by May 12; apparently it has been serving as a "shelter to hobos".
Vinogradov and Dubosarsky have been the top-selling contemporary Russian artists in recent years, but it seems that Dima Gutov is emerging as the painter with the highest profile on the international scene. At the invitation of Biennale director Robert Storr, Gutov will show 20 paintings in the Arsenale this year. His theme: reading Marx in English. Also participating from Russia: Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and Andrei Monastyrsky. Gutov also takes part in Documenta, later in June.
May 06, 2007
The Times looks at the latest home of Peter Aven, who has, apparently "the world's biggest private collection of Russian art". I'm not sure that he will be pleased by the description of it as, essentially, a "KGB-proof" bolt-hole. Your patriotic credentials are massively important in Russia today.
Art Times (in Russian) has an extended interview with Olga Sviblova, curator of the Russian pavilion at the forthcoming Venice Biennale. By way, I suppose, of explaining the inclusion of a project by unknown artist Julia Milner, an ex-model married to an extremely rich oilman, she points out that the official budget of the Russian pavilion is a paltry 80,000 euros, compared to, for example, the French budget of a million.
You can talk as much as you like about pure art, but without material support contemporary high-technology projects cannot be carried out.
She has a point, but whether it is enough of a point is moot.
May 04, 2007
The Moscow Times has detail on a couple of events covered here a few days ago: the Innovation Prize and the projects for a monument to Yeltsin (or EBN [Eltsin, Boris Nikolaevich], as someone dubbed him). In a sign of the times, in Moscow, the Soviet-era Museum of Public Catering will become a museum of the art of cooking. Russia is Guest of Honour at the Geneva Book Fair; the curator of the Russian pavilion describes contemporary Russian literature as ""tough, brutal and visionary at the same time." And in the St Petersburg Times Leo Mourzenko looks the new patriotic Russian cinema in the form of the movie May and finds it to be A Crime Against Art.
May 01, 2007
Simon Rees in Frieze reviews (pdf) the 2007 Moscow Biennale.
April 29, 2007
The Innovation art-prizes were awarded yesterday. To the artist Vadim Zakharov (for best artwork); to the curator Viktor Miziano (for best curatorial project); to Oleg Kireev (for criticism/theory); to the curator Svetlana Demyanova (for a "regional project") and to the artist Elena Kovylina (as representative of the "new generation"). I reported on these awards last year. An attempt to establish national awards for contemporary art, they face some cynicism in Moscow: from the discussion between public and members of the jury, as reported by Gif.ru:
Alexander Shaburov: This year we see a classic insider-job. The members of the jury - Stella Art, XL and NCCA - all pushed their own projects.
Vladislav Mizin: The prize is shit. It hasn't become a national prize. It's not interesting.
Mikhail Kosolapov: Innovation is a stupid name, it only makes sense if you're trying to sell it to the State.
..and some more in this vein. I think if they upped the prize-money, it might get a little more respect, on the (perhaps dubious, I concede) shock-and-awe principle.The most valuable prize, which is given for the best artwork, is £5,000/$10,000. The UK's Turner Prize, in contrast, offers £25,000/$50,000 (if not more - that was in 2005).
April 29, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
April 28, 2007
Paintings by, and scenes from the studio of, Dima Gutov, as presented by collector Igor Markin on art4.ru.
April 28, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
April 25, 2007
A man called Ray Johnson - not the great collector - put mail art on the map in the USA. In Russia, the prime-mover was Alexander Asarkan. Here in a series of articles in Stengazeta.ru Zinovy Zinik remembers him (pdf; in Russian, several clickable images).
April 25, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
April 23, 2007
The oligarchs may have been dissuaded from attending the economic forum in London, but the art world keeps coming and going. On the plane back from Moscow last night I sat next to Olga Sviblova, founder and director of the Moscow Museum of Photography, noted film-maker and curator of the Russian pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale. And as the aircraft disgorged us, waiting to fly back to Moscow was Iosif Backstein, director of the Moscow Biennale.
Sviblova's controversial project for the Biennale is firmly centred on the internet as an emergent art medium: not only Click I Hope but also works by AES+F and others will be, in one way or another, a response to the possibilities of the virtual world. At present, the Russian pavilion project is facing expensive technical challenges. A press-conference on the pavilion's progress will be held in Moscow this Thursday.
It was interesting to compare notes with Sviblova and discover mutual ground in our assessment of the best artists of the 80s: perhaps, in a few years' time, the next boom-area. Sviblova remarked that the current Russian market isn't really a meaningful market at all, in the sense that prices often seem detached from fundamental considerations of quality or artistic/historic significance. Everyone has their own opinion, of course, about who the top names are or should be, but many people would probably agree in this sense: at the big auctions some artists are egregiously overpriced, others undervalued or completely ignored. So at auction Krasnopevstsev is currently a more expensive artist than Kabakov, Baranov-Rossine than Deineka and so on.
One distorting factor is Russian history: the long period of Soviet isolation and the division between those who stayed in Russia and those who left. It takes a body of works to build a market, and in several cases, if one is considering overpriced artists (let's name a few who have gone through the auctions in London and NY at, in my opinion, inflated prices: Alexander Altmann, Baranov-Rossine, Tarkhov), that body of work has been on hand in the West - whereas the work of non-emigre artists is more difficult of access. Moreover, perversely, a top Soviet artist's work may be almost unavailable because it was absorbed into collections before the advent of the boom, and so his or her market rating will suffer in comparison to a second-rate figure whose large available oeuvre allows promotion.
But these wrinkles will surely iron themselves out as collectors - many of whom, as Sviblova pointed out, are very quick to learn - educate themselves. What is more, today's market irrationality affords good opportunities to buy underrated works cheaply.
April 22, 2007
The Toronto Star reviews (pdf) performance artist Elena Kovylina's show at the Pari Nadimi Gallery.
April 22, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
April 19, 2007
According to Obozrevatel.com (in Russian) some students of Oleg Kulik's were inspired by the recent March of Dissenters in Moscow (14 April) to produce an action of their own, which was to have sex on top of a car as it drove round Moscow. Apparently the police simply hooted their approval. There are varieties of freedom, and Moscow plainly has some that the West does not.
April 19, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
April 15, 2007
Recent video installation by Anna Frants in the antique sculpture galleries of the Hermitage.
April 14, 2007
Desperate Painters opens at Frants Gallery, New York, on Friday 20th. From the press release:
The portion of humanity that cannot live without the painterly content is called "desperate painters".
I have sometimes wondered about this: how many of us are there?
April 05, 2007
According to Kommersant (pdf; in Russian), mystery surrounds the choice of artist Julia Milner to exhibit at the Russian pavilion in Venice this year. Her proposed work consists of a giant plasma screen on which the words "I hope" will be displayed in "all imaginable languages"; visitors will be encouraged to touch the screen to participate in a computer-generated measure of the amount of hope in the world. The mystery is that Julia Milner is apparently entirely unknown to Russian art critics. However, I can reveal that, according to Network Solutions (pdf), the related website clickihope.com is registered to one Yuri Bentsionovich Milner. According to this Google search, a gentleman of this name was a member of the board of Neftyanoi Bank in Moscow in 2006; other searches suggest he may be an eminent Russian businessman. The website contact telephone number is given by Network Solutions, and also an email address. So possibly ask Mr Milner who Julia Milner is?
April 03, 2007
Marat Guelman points the readers of his blog (in Russian) to the Russian national-religious alternative to international contemporary art: a show by Pavel Ryzhenko in the Army Museum. In the interview (in Russian), the artist stresses the need for a Tsar who will be above normal laws, "the bearer of God's truth and the arbiter above all." A visual survey of Ryzhenko's painting is here; it's fairly characteristic of the work encouraged at the Glazunov Academy, where Ryzhenko studied. Of course, there are other young realists in Russia, no less technically accomplished, whose work is less ideologically-determined. Below: a painting of the martyrdom of St George entitled The Choice of Belief.
April 03, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
See also here and here. (Ed: That's enough Melamid in Rome.)
April 03, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
March 30, 2007
The Hermitage has a new project, called Hermitage 20/21 and based in its new wing, which will show and collect contemporary art (from Gif.ru, in Russian). From the press release, I think: "The Museum will collaborate with collectors and artists who can support the project with their works". Which suggests to me that the Hermitage (like now the Tretyakov and the Russian Museum) will work closely with the private commercial sector.
BYU NewsNet looks at the Springville Museum, Utah, which contains one of the pioneering collections of Soviet realism, put together by director Vern Swanson:
"I would say that the most popular collection we have would be the Russian one," Swanson said. "People come from all over the United States just to see this collection."
Vern and I had a lot of contact in the nineties, when we helped assemble the collection of Ray and Susan Johnson, which forms the core of the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis.
A new English-language magazine (pdf), Russia!, presents Russian culture to a US audience. It appears to have a strong roster of editors and contributors (Art Lebedev, Marat Gelman, Boris Akunin). I can't help thinking that exclamation mark is the sign of an inferiority complex, though.
And a blog review (pdf) of Russian graphic novel Siberia.
March 25, 2007
Portraits of Moscow contemporary gallerists from Elle. Those magazine photographers can make anyone look pretty ;)
March 25, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
March 21, 2007
The New York Timeslooks at (pdf) the Moscow Biennale. It seems that one of the works that was confiscated from me at Sheremetevo airport last year is hanging happilly at the Sots-Art show. I didn't notice it: perhaps it was put up after the official opening, to avoid drawing attention? or has the threat of censorship of such satirical images receded?:
Among the pieces on display is a comic photo collage by the Blue Noses group that appears to depict Putin, Osama Bin Laden, and President George W. Bush  lounging together in boxer shorts like three drunken Russians.
March 19, 2007
The Moscow Timesreviews (pdf) the show Forbidden Art at the Andrei Sakharov Museum.
"The curator has simply broken the law," church spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin said. "Defacing a religious ­symbol such as Jesus Christ is not art. It is a civil crime."
Curator Andrei Yerofeyev countered: "Chaplin just wants to make a name for himself." Saying it is not for the church to decide what is art, he added: "Only an artist knows how to portray ­Jesus."
The Washington Post looks at (pdf) the new spaces for contemporary art in Moscow: the Vinzavod, Project Fabrika and the Arma factory.
March 19, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
March 16, 2007
The Art Newspaperlooks at (pdf) the Seminikhin collection.
The St Petersburg Times provides a survey of several exhibitions (pdf) comprising the Moscow Biennale.
March 10, 2007
Bloomberg.com looks at  (pdf) the new wave of contemporary art collectors, especially New York-based real-estate developer Janna Bullock. Info snippet: 200 contemporary collectors in Moscow.
Sophia Kishkovsky surveys (pdf) the Moscow Biennale. Info snippet: 500 contemporary collectors in Moscow.
Anna Malpas reviews (pdf) the Sots Art show at the TG for The Moscow Times.
Overview of investing in Russia. I suppose that if you buy Russian art, wherever you do so, you are effectively doing just that.
March 07, 2007
The first issue of experimental design/illustration magazine Moloko may be downloaded here; features Russian and non-Russian artists.
The Moscow Times looks at the Moscow Biennale (pdf) and the Seminikhin collection (pdf).
Armenian art is on display at the Louvre (pdf).
The show Space Is The Place at Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, Northern California includes Oleg Kulik's Astronaut (it's currently also on display in the Seminikhin collection) (to 27 May).
Russia will not hand over "for free" 362 drawings taken out of Germany in 1945 by a Soviet Army Soldier (pdf).
March 04, 2007
Once upon a time, in the 70s and 80s, Russian artists made paintings with titles along the lines of The Last Inhabitants of the Village X.  They were about the decay of Russian country life. In recent times the contemporary art world in Russia has been a kind of village, in the sense that everybody knew everybody and everybody attended more or less the same events. And now this "village", too, has been overtaken by the modern world. At the recent Sotheby's sale in London I would wager that the majority of those in the audience had never heard of the top-selling artist, Chubarov, the protege of gallerist Gary Tatintsian. The current biennale demonstrates that Moscow has outgrown its former village cosiness: it has fragmented into a host of competing attractions: competing shows, competing round-tables, competing parties. Openings are being bumped further and further: the penalty of mis-scheduling is an empty private view. Last night some partied on a riverboat, other's in Marat Gelman's flat, others at the restaurant Ermak on the outskirts of Moscow, others in Zurab Tsereteli's museum by the Academy of Arts on Prechistenka Street. I was at the last-mentioned venue, decorated with overpowering images of St George (patron saint, as it happens, of Moscow, Georgia and England). Following the meal, Vasili Tsereteli introduced some of us to Tsereteli's Apple, a colossal bronze sculpture whose inner sanctum is covered with life-size erotic sculptures. Don't even think about the k-word; it's something like a Love Hotel on steroids.
March 03, 2007
16.00: The exhibition of Sots Art at the Tretyakov Gallery is a fascinating one-off compilation unlikely to be repeated in the near future. It is pleasantly inclusive and discursive, treating Sots Art as a tendency - and a very loosely-defined one at that - rather than a movement with a narrow range and fixed chronology. So we get contemporary works by Blue Noses, Oleg Kulik and Diana Machulina, and also abstract works from the 60s by Lev Nussberg and others, as well as Francisco Infante’s staged photos, here presented as large illuminated transparencies. Komar and Melamid are physically and conceptually at the heart of the show. There is an array of their early works, including the double self-portrait Sots-Art. Their The People’s Choice, recently sold to a Moscow collector for a reported $1.5 million, is displayed in its entirety. Manhattan-based Leonid Sokov’s work is everywhere, epitomising the core movement’s buffoonery and social acerbity. The catalogue, if, as and when it appears, will be a must-have. Business-is-business aside: I was glad during the private view to broker the sale of four works by rising star Diana Machulina from the Overcoat Gallery of Alexander Petrelli (yes, that's a gallery he keeps in the inside of his overcoat) to a well-known London collector. Below: works from the Sots Art show by
- Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov
- Komar and Melamid (banners)
- Komar and Melamid (The People's Choice)
- Komar and Melamid (Sots Art)
- Rostislav Lebedev, No Exit
- Dmitri Vrubel and Grisha Bruskin
- Blue Noses, Kitchen Suprematism
18.00:The unveiling of official projects of the Biennale at the Shchusev Museum. A  survey of Jeff Wall’s photoworks and a superb exhibition by Pipilotti Rist, including a beguiling projection and an installation; Cologne dealer Alec Lachmann buttonholed me on the staircase to insist that this was contemporary art at its very best; he's probably not far off.
19.30: The opening of the new commercial spaces at the VinZavod complex. Most of them still lack a final fit-out, but they are impressively-sized. In the unilluminated towering space of the new Aidan Gallery an audio work by Elena Berg. In the equally dark Ridzhina, video projections (by an artist whose name I couldn’t find advertised on the walls) of considerable beauty. And at Guelman a show-stopper, or show-starter: giant portrait paintings by Ilya Chichkan surmounted by basketball nets attached by the Blue Noses, loud music and a mass of loose basket-balls. Watch gallerist Guelman as he helps a distressed visitor, meets, greets, weaves, shoots...
22.00: An after-party organised by Aidan Salakhova at a swish embankment venue called The Apartments. A world away from the slushy walkways and unfinished spaces of the VinZavod. Here, at table after table, sat the high fashion and heavy money on which this scene depends. Downstairs, as I left, I saw an artist in jeans and a t-shirt engaged in a hapless effort to get past the security.
March 02, 2007
The overwhelming impression of the second Moscow contemporary art Biennale is of the exponential growth of the contemporary art scene here: the official programme is now accompanied and challenged by a mass of off-piste shows: Oleg Kulik's Veryu (already reviewed), which hosts a reception tomorrow; a mass opening of new gallery spaces at the VinZavod complex; an exhibition of SotsArt curated by Andrei Erofeev at the Tretyakov Gallery, and much more (including four shows arranged by Gelman Gallery alone).

Which makes it all the more difficult to know what to make of the opening of the main events last night. There was a certain consistency of implausibility, almost as if the organisers were impostors, this wasn’t really an art festival and no-one had been invited.
The first show of the official programme, presented in an empty space on the top floor of the department store TsUM, was prefaced by speeches in the midst of the perfume counters, given by apparatchiks who seemed uncertain of themselves and watched by bemused salesgirls. There was a perfunctory attempt at drinks and canapes. The crowd traipsed upstairs by escalator and chatted, for want of an alternative, in the aisles of clothes. The video installation (see below) was interesting, but the concept, a history of American video art, seems a little, how shall I put it, lazy; its disarming simplicity undermines the necessary perception of curator as uber-intellectual.
The second show of the evening, spread over multiple floors of the Federation Tower in the new, unfinished Moscow City complex, was initially more disquieting. Invited guests elbowed their way through a milling crowd to pass the security checkpoint  (well, some of them did: others turned around and gave up). Then they endured a truly anxiety-inducing fifteen-minute crush to pass through a second narrow gateway (see photo below - were my ribs 15 years older, they would now be in pieces). Fiinally a basic builders’ lift hoisted them up the outside of the building to the reception on the 18th floor.
Inside, I enjoyed some warm Italian fizzy wine masquerading as Soviet shampanskoe. The curators themselves I didn't spot, with the exception of indefatigable chief curator Iosif Bakshtein (below; also in frame left is art journalist Maria Roguleva and, dimly visible in the background, ubiquitous curator Dasha Pyrkina and kavaler).
I'm aware that this review is focused on extraneous matters: a stress-induced reaction. What, at last, about the art? Well, it's not bad. The three exhibition levels in the Federation Tower housed several discrete curatorial projects and many interesting pieces. Some, it is true, have been seen at other comparable events. Below is a selection of works by Russian artists: Diana Machulina, Vadim Zakharov, Natasha Struchkova and Andrei Roiter, the last-named a rare visitor from New York, where he has lived since the 1990s.
 
 
February 24, 2007
Boris Mikhailov recently spent a couple of months in Japan: showing, lecturing, working. We've agreed he will present works from his Japanese series at the Matthew Bown Gallery in October or November this year. The working title of the show is Sick of Reality. The photographs are quite sumptuous: luscious, painterly, almost anti-empirical. They represent Mikhailov's turning away from the investigation of the post-Soviet underbelly he undertook in the 90s towards something altogether more lyrical. There are connections between these latest works and the "sandwiched slides" of the 70s (a recent album of these has been published by Phaidon). Mikhailov reports that Berlin is a great place for an artist: accommodation is cheap, living is cheap, and galleries are springing up everywhere. Only sales are weak. But if the art is there, that will change. Maybe the centre of gravity of the German art world will indeed shift from old-money places such as Cologne to Berlin; but if so it will be because of the absence, not the presence, of money in Berlin: it is the very lack of money in the city, which means low real estate prices, that enables new artists and new gallerists to do their thing.
February 24, 2007 in Contemporary art, Photography|Permalink
February 22, 2007
Gif.ru reports (in Russian) that works by photographer Ivan Ushkov, from St Petersburg, have been removed from the show Young Artists of Russia currently underway in the Central House of the Artist, Moscow. The given reason: they don't, in the eyes of the Moscow exhibition committee, "correspond with the image of Russia". A slide-show of grotesque and sometimes gory but undeniably thoughtful images is on Newsru.com , which reports that the prohibited works were sent to the exhibition by the St Petersburg Artists' Union. The local police, who visited Ushakov's premises and removed computer disks, are said to have accused him of creating fascist propaganda, but there are no reports that charges have been laid.
Viktor Misiano will curate a show of Russian and Baltic art at the Benaki Museum to accompany the next Art Athina, Athens's contemporary art fair. Art Athina runs May 31 to June 3.
February 22, 2007 in Contemporary art, Ex-USSR|Permalink
February 21, 2007
The first exhibition in the premises of the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, the museum of Vladimir and Ekaterina Seminikhin, opens to the public today in Moscow (Kuznetsky Most 21/5). The show presents artists of the 1910s-20s (Popova, Stepanova, Tyshler, Samokhvalov et al.) and contemporary artists (Komar and Melamid, Faibvisovich, Blue Noses, Oleg Kulik), skipping comprehensively over the art made in mid-century. Ekaterina Foundation show webpage.
Meanwhile, this evening in New Jersey, a rare opportunity to see early movies by Leningrad "necro-realist" Evgeni Yufit at the Montclair SU Film Forum.
February 17, 2007
Talk proliferates about the huge sum (£288,000) paid for Evgeni Chubarov's painting on Thursday. I was called yesterday by a well-known art reporter who wanted my comment on the "conspiracy theory": was the price artificially inflated in order to boost  the value of Chubarov's oeuvre? I had no comment, except to point out that we have seen these spikes before, notably the £500,000+ paid for a work by Krasnopevtsev last year, and to suggest that they may be an artefact of an immature market, in which reputations and values are still being hammered out.  However, there the comparison ends. Krasnopevtsev is dead, has an honoured place in Russian art history and museums etc., and is broadly collected. The million-dollar price paid for his work, however apparently excessive in the context of what had gone before, could be understood as an exceptional price for an exceptional piece (which it was). Chubarov on the other hand, is alive, relatively unknown, was not hitherto widely sought-after, and presumably has a studio full of work. The price paid for his painting doesn't seem capable of explanation in the same way.
The Chubarov case aside, it strikes me as naive to think one could manipulate the market significantly by bidding up prices at a Sotheby's auction: first, even if you are effectively bidding on a work you own, it's an expensive business (nearly 30% of the final price goes to Sotheby's); second, everyone is sceptical of inexplicable price-hikes of this order; third, a single sale does not a market make: what is needed is broad collector demand sustained over years, backed up by scholarship and museum-level support.
February 15, 2007
Erik Bulatov's Revolution-Perestroika didn't quite manage to live up to its star billing, reaching £165,000 plus buyer's commission; the underbidder was Elena Kuprina, who often buys for the Seminikhin Collection; the buyer was on the phone (I illustrated this work about 20 years ago in my book Contemporary Russian Art). The top lot, by a long way, was a large abstract canvas, Untitled, by Evgeni Chubarov, a self-taught painter curently settled in Germany, which rose to an astonishing £240,000 + premium. I wasn't expecting that (who was?) and nipped out to put money in the parking meter while the great sale occurred; it's an event analogous to the Grisha Bruskin sensation at Sotheby's sale in Moscow in 1988. The Chubarov drama apart (equating to nearly $600,000 gross), the Bulatov and a few other pieces set a kind of upper-region benchmark for contemporary Russian art in the $350-400,000 range. The Bulatov just exceeded the price of the Mikhail Shvartsman, which had the perfect provenance, being from the Costaki collection (£160,000 + premium), and the Vladimir Weisberg nude (£155,000 + premium). The only other work to break the £100,000 barrier was a very big Oleg Tselkov (£105,000 + premium). Other successes included Rabin (£52,000 + premium), Masterkova (£68,000 + premium), Rukhin (£60,000 + premium). Of the 1980s generation,  Maksim Kantor (who was in the audience) did oustandingly, reaching £55,000 + premium. Notable disappointments must include Vladimir Yankilevski (only £9,000 + premium), the exquisite Vitali Komar (unaccountably unsold), Natalia Nesterova (unsold: maybe she is too prolific?),  and a beautiful very large Eduard Shteinberg which struggled to £32,000 + premium. The Soviet/post-Soviet (or pre- and post-emigration) divide was felt very strongly in the prices paid for Oleg Vasilev's two paintings: £90,000 + premium for a pre-1991 work, £8,000 + premium for an admittedly smaller but very attractive post-1991 view of New York (covered in snow: it could well have been Moscow; it's lovely and I bought it). A large crowd of London Russians gathered to do the auction thing, which is jot down the prices, including art historian Igor Golomshtok and artist Dmitri Prigov. Overall, I think, the sale, total about $5 million, must be considered a success; I imagine Sotheby's will make it an annual event.
February 15, 2007 in Auctions, Contemporary art|Permalink
February 14, 2007
The Tuesday-night party for Sotheby's modern and contemporary sale was well attended. A contingent is here from New York, including collector-dealer Roman Tabakman. We were all waiting for the appearance of Vitali Komar, who is in London, but he gave the event a miss. The New York dealers I spoke to seem to think that consigning to Sotheby's in London makes more sense than consigning to Sotheby's in New York: that is the wonder of Londongrad and the falling dollar. There are several fine paintings in this sale: it will be interesting to see if the market recognises them; and whether the collector-base is big enough to support 150-odd lots. William Macdougall of Macdougall auction house spied several of the clients who made his last sale a success and predicted a good result for Sotheby's.
February 14, 2007 in Auctions, Contemporary art|Permalink
February 08, 2007
Details of the projects and venues of the upcoming 2nd Moscow Biennale are now available on the Biennale's website.
More on the North Attleboro Yakovlev, including an image (pdf). The Times speculates (pdf) that Boris Berezovsky was bidding at Sotheby's modern sale on Monday night. An interview (pdf) with Mike Alewitz, an artist inspired by Soviet revolutionary art, who is giving a lecture, Agitprop: Street Art of the Revolution, today at 2 pm, at the Central Connecticut State University: Samuel S. T. Chen Fine Arts Center. The  exhibition Nostalgic Technologies, by Svetlana Boym, has its opening reception at the Transit Gallery, Cambridge MA, on Wednesday, February 21.
February 07, 2007
Colin Gleadell (pdf) on the upcoming Sotheby's contemporary Russian sale.
I was about to draft a post contrasting the vibrant market for 1980s Russian art with the moribund market for 1980s British art. Then today I bid on an early eighties painting by a British artist, highly-regarded at the time but these days ignored, selling at Sotheby's Olympia. With my assistance, bidding most of the way against one other party, it jumped to 2.4 times estimate, for a final price including commissions etc of about $30,000. Adhering to what we might call the Cherry Principle, deriving from Mrs Dorothy Cherry's conviction that she should acquire "the greatest", I bought it.
February 07, 2007 in Auctions, Contemporary art|Permalink
The building in which Igor Markin's museum of contemporary art will open.
February 07, 2007 in Contemporary art, Museums|Permalink
February 02, 2007
The Moscow Timeslooks at (pdf) an exhibition of Orthodox art, that is, icons and church embroideries. Not a few artists in Moscow have taken training and now make a living, or a side-income, painting icons. Meanwhile The St Petersburg Times considers the opposite pole (pdf) of contemporary Russian art: the 15-year retrospective of the Guelman Gallery in the Russian Museum.
January 30, 2007
Artprice.com (subscription required) looks at the art of emerging markets.
... over 5 years, the prices of contemporary Chinese art works have progressed 440%! ... Over the same period, the number of Chinese to have entered the TOP 100 contemporary artists, ranked by sales revenue, has grown from 1 to 25. In 2001, only CAI GUO-QIANG held 59th position with an annual sales revenue of USD 207,000. In 2006, ZHANG XIAOGANG made it to the second position, ahead of Jeff Koons, with a total sales revenue of 23.7 million dollars! American artists usually dominate the ranking, but in 2006 there were only 23. Indeed, now that China and India are contributing so strongly to the global art market, the entry ticket to the TOP 100 has gone up from USD 94,000 dollars to USD 720,000 !
(The rankings seem to be based on auction sales; the decline in the value of the dollar may well be the reason, or part of it, for the decline in the number of US artists). It is interesting to contrast the influx of Chinese artists, and their price rises with the absolute failure of young Russian artists to impact the market to anything like the same degree. What are the factors in this discrepancy? Well, there are many more Chinese than Russians, and so many more potential buyers, that's for sure. But there are surely art-specific reasons. First, Chinese contemporary is far more consumer-friendly than Russian contemporary, relying as it does on traditional painterly and photographic skills which are developed to a high degree (circumstantial support of this conclusion: the most commercially successful Russian artists are Vinogradov and Dubosarsky who, like the Chinese, paint in a familiar vernacular). Second, Chinese contemporary art has achieved better commercial gallery exposure in the art centres - New York, London etc. -  than Russian contemporary; this may reflect simply the appeal of the art (the first point) but also perhaps the superior entrepreneurial skills of Chinese gallerists. Third it has been more thoroughly supported by rich Chinese (perhaps on the reported patriotic premise that if the top Western artists can command $100 million for a masterpiece, so should a Chinaman); most rich Russians in contrast at first adverted to the pre-1917 era, although some are now looking at later works. So it seems that Russian contemporary, were it to adjust a little to common taste, could have a long way to rise. On the other hand its ragged-trousered philanthropy and innate obstreperousness are a large part of what makes it, to me, compelling; and the Chinese market may be a bubble (I have seen a report of shill-bidding at auction). To get an idea of the contrast between the highly-controlled, technically adept, traditionalist, sentimental-yet-glacial works of the top-selling Chinese, on the one hand, and Russian boisterousness on the other, compare paintings by best selling Chinese artists Zhang Xiaogang, Ai Xuan and Fang Lijun below, with the art at Veryu.
UPDATE: a conversation with a gallerist who has experience in both Russia and China bears out, sort of, the remarks above. He thinks the Chinese success is due above all to the leveraging of traditional painting skills; but he adds that it's also a matter of attitude. Chinese artists are far more intent on impressing the West than the Russians; they are more au fait with international trends and demands; and and they make the experience of Westeners - curators, gallerists, critics, dealers, collectors - easier (and sometimes more pleasant) than the obstacle course that is Russia.
January 28, 2007
The catalogue for Sotheby's upcoming sale contains a number of very interesting works, among them Komar's Broken Wing, a rare early work from the Bluebird Cafe days (watch btw the related interview in the right hand column of this page); an unusually big (2m) 1975 Tselkov; an unusually big, intense, Soviet-era Nesterova; an even bigger work by Vadim Zakharov from the days at Furmanny Pereulok; Afrika's striking Malevich! from the same period. There are other good pieces.
Vitali Komar
Oleg Tselkov
Natalia Nesterova
Vadim Zakharov
Afrika
January 28, 2007 in Auctions, Contemporary art|Permalink
January 26, 2007
Brian Droitcour in the Moscow Times on Veryu (pdf).
January 25, 2007
Veryu (I Believe) is the preliminary salvo of the upcoming Moscow Biennale: a huge show curated in a few months by Oleg Kulik, who was the driving force of contemporary Russian art in the 90s. Veryu is sited in the main space of the VinZavod (Wine Factory) gallery complex, in great arched halls which remind many of the Venice Arsenale but which in their branching upstairs-downstairs configuration are probably better suited to the meandering, non-linear, recursive narratives of contemporary art. The Wednesday-night opening was billed as VIP-only, and the gleaming 4x4’s queued outside, but in the end all-comers were ushered into the frosty vastness. No food, a little mulled wine, bemused security wearing "I Believe" ID.
Dima Gutov, Dead Christ (after Mantegna), 2006
January 23, 2007
A Grandee of the Moscow contemporary art scene remembers a conversation with Dubosarsky and Vinogradov in the early nineties. The subject: exactly what kind of art would succeed best in the post-communist dispensation. D & V stated that it would be hard-core figurative and large-scale. This at a time when everyone was making conceptual art or installations or, at the very least, abstraction: and everyone scoffed. D & V have the current last laugh.
January 23, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
Kolya Filatov on the origins of the group Detski Sad (Kindergarten):
Kabakov said, "Why are you wasting time, kids? An artist should work." So we started working. And the word went out that we had started working. That's how Detski Sad was born.
In Filatov's studio stands a painting from the eighties by another noted artist of the period, Sergei Volkov. It's in poor condition and Filatov is restoring it. But it's also rare: Volkov for reasons of his own has set about destroying his oeuvre from this era. He recently travelled to Berlin to destroy ten works.
January 23, 2007 in Contemporary art|Permalink
January 21, 2007
Irina Kulik, in Kommersant (in Russian) considers the recently-announced closure of Stella Art Gallery. What will remain is the non-commercial Stella Art Foundation, planning apparently to open a museum of contemporary art in Moscow in 2010 (I have lost count how many private museums are planned in Moscow). Kulik notes that the Stella gallery, which opened in luxurious granite-clad central-Moscow premises about (as I recall) three years ago, helped transform the down-at-heel, bohemian Moscow contemporary art world into a moneyed and fashionable scene. She puts its closure down to the difficulty of competing with established galleries such as Guelman and XL: Stella was forever "borrowing" for its shows artists signed to other galleries.
On his blog (in Russian) Marat Guelman makes an important point about the "ambitious" Stella Art Gallery and about the role of a gallerist in general:
Ambition is not the most important quality in a gallerist. If anything, the reverse is the case: what is needed is the ability to work with the ambitions of others.
January 19, 2007
Brian Droitcour's review of the just-opened Blue Noses show at Guelman Gallery is up. A meme that recurs here (I saw it in yesterday's Russian press, although maybe it originates in some cunning gallery pr or other?) is that the Noses are the Moscow art scene's version of Borat. What does this tell us? Well, that we human beings like to understand things by analogy, I suppose. I saw the show today and was, frankly, for all my admiration for the Siberian wunderkinder (who sell well in my gallery), ever-so-slightly disappointed: the mixture of old and new work, conceived obviously as a riposte to the attack on Guelman and his gallery last year, seemed to me to lack some of the customary exuberance. But maybe I was simply feeling under the weather; certainly Tretyakov Gallery curator Andrei Erofeev's assertion that the Blue Noses are the most "impressive phenomenon" in 21st century Russian art is arguable. It is interesting note to what extent Guelman's, and more broadly Moscow artists pass around motifs and ideas among themselves: monkeys, for example, have over the past few years appeared as surrogate humans in work by Oleg Kulik and Dima Gutov and now again here.
January 18, 2007
The countdown to Oleg Kulik's huge curated show Veryu (I Believe), due to open to VIPs in less than a week (on 24 January), is a nail-biting affair: while artists install their projects, the preparation of the space itself is still underway, electricians install the lighting etc.
Following perhaps the apparently successful lead given by Christies, who arranged a pre-auction show last year in Samara, Sotheby's will show 20 works from their 15 February modern Russian auction in Moscow 25-28 January (from rian.ru, in Russian).
January 18, 2007 in Auctions, Contemporary art|Permalink
December 31, 2006
Work on Oleg Kulik's monumental project Veryu ("I Believe") is proceeding apace. Each participant is required to produce a special project; most of the thirty-odd participants have had their ideas rejected multiple times as Kulik forces the bar higher in search of a new level of ambition and professionalism. Post-modern irony is definitely out, New High Seriousness is in. Maybe Boris Groys's prediction for the exhibition will be borne out. The show will occupy a huge space in the new VinZavod complex; the "closed opening" for VIPs takes place 24th January, the public opening on 27th. Total cost: over $300,000, unheard of for a privately-curated show in Russia. Kulik himself dons a suit from time to time to glean funds from Moscows oli- and minigarchs. Chief sponsor Vasili Tsereteli is wondering, will there be a massive scandal, outdoing Look Out! Religion! and the recent Blue Noses confiscation?
December 31, 2006 in Contemporary art, Exhibitions|Permalink
December 18, 2006
Bloomberg previews the upcoming Sotheby's sale of contemporary Russian art in London. Star lot may be Erik Bulatov's Revolution-Perestroika of 1988.
December 16, 2006
In the last few days the Saatchi Gallery blog has reprised the Blue Noses confiscation. Meanwhile, on his blog, Marat Gelman reports that the next Blue Noses show, entitled åáàíûé ôàøèçì (I'll leave the translation to someone more, er, articulate than I) opens in his gallery 15th January.
December 12, 2006
Oleg Kulik's exhibition project Veryu (I Believe) has a website (in Russian).
December 12, 2006 in Contemporary art, Exhibitions|Permalink
December 11, 2006
Collector Igor Markin, one of the first to attempt a comprehensive collection of Russian contemporary art, shows snapshots of his home. Below: the dining room with a work by Konstantin Zvezdochetov. More on his LiveJournal page.
December 11, 2006 in Collectors, Contemporary art|Permalink
December 10, 2006
Lindsay Pollock/Bloomberg reports on the Russian art contingent at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair.
December 06, 2006
The Independent reports on Damian Hirst's sell-out show at the modestly-named Triumph Gallery. Marat Gelman approves the show in his blog (in Russian), and here, via Igor Markin, are a view of the show and Hirst himself with collector Markin.
 
December 06, 2006 in Contemporary art, Exhibitions|Permalink
November 30, 2006
At a supper in London last night given by collectors of contemporary art, Boris Groys predicted that Oleg Kulik's upcoming show Veryu (I Believe), an exploration (as I understand it) of what it means to be an artist in Russia, planned to open in conjunction with the 2007 Moscow Biennale, will be the most significant exhibition of the post-1991 era. Kulik has grown an impressive beard recently, perhaps in search of a patriarchal aura, although the effect is more Muslim than Russian, to my mind.
November 30, 2006 in Contemporary art, Exhibitions|Permalink
Vasili Tsereteli, the grandson of Russian art-world supremo Zurab Tsereteli, has been put in charge of the Russian pavilion at the next Venice Biennale. It is reported he intends to ask Olga Sviblova, director of the Moscow Museum of Photography, to curate the exhibition itself. It may seem like nepotism to some people, but on the other hand Tsereteli junior has a fairly thorough art education and also a track record as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow.
November 27, 2006
Natasha Milovzorova at Guelman Gallery emails me a letter to sign, on the basis of which the eleven Blue Noses' works held at Sheremetevo Airport are to be released into Guelman Gallery hands. No word at present of any charges. Does this bear out my instinct that the whole event was a bureaucratic vagary of the customs/airport police? On a related, perhaps, topic: Masha Lipman of the Washington Post looks at the controversy around the movie Borat in Russia. Her assertion that the reluctance to distribute Borat is "the first time the post-Communist Russian authorities have banned a piece of creative expression in years" may or may not be strictly correct, but it overlooks the problems faced in recent times not only by me with the Blue Noses but also by exhibitions such as Look Out! Religion!
November 22, 2006
Gif.ru reports on the Russian presence at Art Basel Miami Beach: Modus R, a project curated by Olesya Turkina and Evgeniya Kikoidze; and Saw, a work by Andrei Filippov, presented by Elena Kuprina.
Jewishsf.com reviews Grisha Bruskin's show at Meyerowitz Gallery, San Francisco.
November 22, 2006 in Contemporary art, Exhibitions|Permalink
November 13, 2006
NY Arts magazine reviews an exhibition of contemporary Lithuanian art.
November 13, 2006 in Contemporary art, Ex-USSR|Permalink
November 08, 2006
The Washington Post considers Marat Gelman. It covers his former affiliation with the Putin political machine which he seems now (judging by his blog) to rue.
November 06, 2006
A couple of snapshots by collector Igor Markin of his very own private museum of contemporary art, currently in construction.
October 27, 2006
FADblog looks at Komar and Melamid's World's Most Wanted series of paintings. The word is, this series has been recently sold to a Russian collector for (depending on whom you talk to) $1 or $1.5 million. The entire series was apparently transferred to Melamid's possession after K & M split.
October 24, 2006
Gif.ru reports (in Russian) that the confiscated Blue Noses' works will be held for 10 days by the prosecutor's office.
October 23, 2006
The Blue Noses page is up on the Matthew Bown website, together with a description of the  events surrounding the show, including links to worldwide press comment.
UPDATE: here are some of the links, I'll add more as they appear:
October 22, 2006
Global Voices Online looks at the perceived threat to the Russian-language LiveJournal community, many of whom are worried by the proposed sale of their service to entrepreneurs including oligarch Aleksandr Mamut. They fear the sale could compromise their privacy (in some cases, anonymity). LiveJournal is a major forum for the Russian creative community: contributors from the Russian artworld include gallerist Marat Gelman (username: galerist), artist Liza Morozova of Escape (username: peformansist), artist Dmitri Vrubel (username: dvrubel), artist Avdei Ter-Oganyan (username: teroganyan), artist Natalia Struchkova (username: struch), curator Dasha Pyrkina of the National Centre for Contemporary Art (username: d---p), collector Igor Markin (username: art4ru).
October 21, 2006
I feel it behoves me to report that I was treated in civilised fashion during my detention at Sheremetevo airport, installed in the First Class Lounge, plied with tea and cake. It was of course a fairly dramatic event, being removed from the plane minutes before take-off. The little room where I was questioned is decorated with quaint Soviet-style posters warning against bribery etc., but my interrogators (there were several) didn't seem mired in the past and professed surprise that plainly absurdist works such as the Blue Noses' should have been the cause of my detention and a minor skandal. My statement was punctuated by calls from Reuters, Ekho Moskvy radio station and other news outlets who had been alerted to the story by Marat Guelman's LiveJournal and press campaign. The journalists' thesis seemed to be that my arrest signalled to re-introduction of wide state censorship of the arts. I'm not sure if I buy that. The entire exhibition has however been confiscated in Moscow, and although I believe it will be released, it is unclear to me when that might be. For the time being at least I understand that charges are being considered, although exactly for what, and against whom, I was not told. I have given an undertaking to return to Moscow as and when required.
UPDATE: I have a text from Julia Guelman: Marat has been assaulted, his gallery smashed. Maybe this puts a different complexion on yesterday's events.
October 18, 2006
The Vermont Cynic (great name, as I'm sure I'm not the first to point out) reviews a talk by Vitali Komar.
October 18, 2006 in Contemporary art|Permalink
October 15, 2006
Georgina Adam of the Art Newspaper reports on the prsence of Russian collectors at Frieze.
October 10, 2006
The New Statesman looks at the super-rich art buyers from Eastern Europe, focussing on Viktor Pinchuk, creator of a new museum of contemporary art in Kiev. Pinchuk says "To spend money is much more exciting than to make it." (To which I say, "Hmmm, easier, too.") The Art Newspaper has reviewed his creation.
October 09, 2006
At last: an article on the art-collecting Wives and Girlfriends of the Russian rich.
October 07, 2006
The Art Newspaper looks at the new museum of contemporary art in Kiev, founded by oligarch Viktor Pinchuk. It suggests that the creation of a museum may be "part of a protective strategy" by Mr Pinchuk in the volatile post-Soviet Ukraine. That is of course how some in the UK interpret Roman Abramovich's purchase of, and lavish expenditure on, Chelsea Football Club; and how others interpret the art-buying of Viktor Vekselberg and other oligarchs.
September 30, 2006
The St Petersburg Times looks at the Hermitage symposium on the contemporary art market; among the contributors: Aidan Salakhova of Aidan Gallery and Vladimir Ovcharenko of Ridzhina Gallery.
September 30, 2006 in Contemporary art, Museums|Permalink
September 28, 2006
For my (subtitled) interview with Erik Bulatov, made a couple of years ago in Paris, click on the movie icon in the right-hand column.
September 12, 2006
A round up (all in Russian) of the open-air sculpture exhibition Art-Pole (Art-Field) organised by Aidan Salakhova. All via gif.ru: Andrei Kovalev in Time Out, Nikita Alekseev in gazeta.ru, Irina Kulik in Kommersant, Fedor Romer in Vremya Novostei.
September 10, 2006
On gif.ru, an interview with the chief curator of the 2007 Moscow Biennale, Iosif Bakshtein. Bakshtein explains the origin of the Biennale's title, Geopoliticics, Markets, Amnesia: Notes ("We spread out words [associated with Russian art] as in a game of patience or a mosaic" - yes, I'm familiar with this kind of brainstorming in my own exhibition programme!) The epithet "Amnesia" relates to "the end of the era of Enlightenment, the crisis of traditional cultural institutions, including the Museum". Invited foreign artists assembled by roving groups of curators, including Hans-Ulruch Obrist, Roza Martinez, Daniel Birnmaum, Yara Bubnova, will show alongside Russian artists, many of them young and some from the provinces. The main exhibition space will be the reconstructed TsUM (Central Supermarket) by Kuznetski Most; there will be 30 or more accompanying events in other venues, including at some point I hope Katya Degot's project about 1920s-30s, The Great Breakthrough. The budget is $2 million, with extra outsourced funding for special guests and projects. In detail here (in Russian).
August 25, 2006
The Pusto video festival is at the Fabrika arts' space until Sunday 27th. I attended the opening last night and was struck by the classy work of Alexandra Mitlyanskaya, particularly the portrait of a man viewed through a kind of goldfish bowl. The films looked handsome projected on an outside wall. The Moscow Times review is here.
July 28, 2006
Vitali Komar in conversation with conceptual artist Jonathon Keats this Sunday, 30th July, at Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley.

UPDATE: this is sold out.

July 28, 2006 in Contemporary art|Permalink
July 21, 2006
At ArtNet, Kate Sutton surveys the shows in St Petersburg during the G8 summit.
July 21, 2006 in Contemporary art|Permalink
July 20, 2006
The eighth edition of the Contemporary Russian Art Newsletter is out.
July 20, 2006 in Contemporary art|Permalink
July 05, 2006
Written some years ago, but it has only just come to my attention: Richard McBee's article takes issue with Komar and Melamid's manipulation of symbols such as the swastika and Star of David. With hindsight, it would seem that this late strand in the duo's work was essentially the brainchild of Komar, who developed it further after K & M split.
June 23, 2006
The curators and main projects for the 2007 Moscow Biennale, directed as before by Iosif Bakshtein, have been announced.
June 19, 2006
At Sheremetevo II waiting for the flight back to London I come across an article on society-portraitist Nikas Safronov in the freebie Airport magazine. Safronov has painted President Putin and other political big-wigs and celebrities. I've never met him, and I can't get worked up about his paintings, they're so remote from what I choose to look at. But I wonder, is an artist such as Safronov (and you can find his equivalent in other countries) good or bad for art? On the one hand, as an artist who (to coin a phrase) speaks kitsch to power, he seems like a spoiler of taste. On the other hand, maybe any art is better than no art on the walls of the rich and powerful, in that it may create in them a susceptibility to, interest in or sympathy towards art in general.
June 16, 2006
Sergei Bazilev was one of the notable artists of the 1980s: a new face from Kiev who inscribed himself in the history of Soviet hyper-realism (soon to be the subject of a major Moscow survey). Here, in its charming home setting (metro Dinamo), is Bazilev's portrait of his wife from the key mid-80s period. Alla Bulyanskaya is gearing up for a show by Bazilev in London, Olga Lopukhova is planning to show his paintings on sheet metal (early 90s): so Bazilev is currently warm-going-on-hot.
June 16, 2006 in Contemporary art|Permalink
June 13, 2006
Survey of ArtMoskva/ArtMoscow and the Moscow art scene by Walter Robinson at artnet.com.
June 10, 2006
Gif.ru reports (in Russian) that Russia will be represented at the Sydney Biennale by painter and theoretician Dima Gutov, photographer Olga Chernysheva and performance artist Elena Kovylina.
June 10, 2006 in Contemporary art|Permalink
May 24, 2006
bloomberg.com briefly reviews the results of the recent ArtMoskva/ArtMoscow contemporary art fair. Total reported sales: $3.1 million.
Marat Guelman, director of the Marat Guelman Gallery, said this year's fair was a watershed.
"Up until this fair, the contemporary art scene in Russia was something like a charity where we were always asking for handouts,'' Guelman said. ``Now, Russian galleries can stand on their own feet and make money.''
May 23, 2006
Artfacts has an interview with Vasily Bychkov, organiser of ArtMoskva/ArtMoscow.
May 18, 2006
Scene from ArtMoskva. At the Fine Art Gallery stand a gentleman describing himself as the assistant to one of Russia's most notorious oligarchs inquires about the cost of a painting by Dima Shurin. On being told the price is $10,000, he offers 5. On being turned down he begins to shout at the galerist, Ira Filatova. He questions her competence. He explains that he spends millions at Sothebys. He explains that his wife's earrings cost a million dollars and her pearl necklace two million. The latter remark appears to gratify his wife, but none of this helps his cause. The price stays at $10,000 and he goes away empty-handed.
Filatova's mistake of course was to price the painting too low ;)
May 17, 2006
The first day of Moscow's premier contemporary art show. Below is a fragment of Georgi Ostretsov's huge comic-strip mural of artworld personalities, which decorates the stairwells. More images after the cut.
May 14, 2006
The New York Sun reviews the Kabakovs' show at Sean Kelly Gallery, NY.
April 30, 2006
The Photo Biennale at the Manezh is obsessed with the body, usually naked. Seeing this lascivious show one realises just how much minimalism was bound up with a protestant or even puritanical approach to life. Meanwhile at the Central House of the Artist a show by Hamburg Artist Norbert Winter wins my vote as the kitschiest exhibition, er, ever. I ask gallerist Lena, who has a space next to this overpowering display, how she survives what to my mind must be the psychological battering involved in walking back and forth past Winter's monstrous canvases to the staircase. She tells me she doesn't take the stairs, she always takes the lift.
April 22, 2006
Lenin was born 136 years ago today. To mark the anniversary, here is the life-size Lenin Cake created by artist Yuri Shabelnikov in the late nineties.
April 22, 2006 in Contemporary art|Permalink
April 16, 2006
Colin Gleadell reported recently on the exploding Chinese art market, and the contemporary scene in particular. See also here. From a visit yesterday to the Chinese photography show at Max Protetch Gallery in Chelsea, NY, it's plain that the Chinese can make "contemporary art" just like they do everything else - as well as, if not better than, the Western originals. Everything's here: the immaculate technique, the manipulation of political and cultural stereotypes, the discreet yet freaky eroticism, games with form, urban grit, vast lyrical landscapes. Price-wise there is no doubt that Chinese contemporary has outstripped Russian contemporary. Both were launched in post-communist societies in the nineties, so why the disparity? Well, despite the Russian oil money, the Chinese economy is doing better than the Russian, that's surely the chief reason. Also, Russian taste seems inherently more conservative: the big Russian money has hitherto concentrated on nineteenth century masters such as Ivan Aivazovski and Ivan Shishkin.
However, taste is undoubtedly evolving in Russia. Dealers such as Natalia Kournikova have introduced School of Paris abstractionists such as Andre Lanskoy into Russia and are now successfully pushing 60s nonconformist art; a big Komar and Melamid painting from the 1980s can now be expected to fetch $100,000+. It may well be that the forgery scandals surrounding nineteenth-century works will encourage more collectors into the less risky area of recent art. Maybe the contemporary works in Sotheby's upcoming NY sales will show the way ahead.
Gleadell writes of collectors "who believe that if a Picasso can sell for $100 million, then the best Chinese artists of the 20th century should be worth much more than they currently are." On the one hand, it's a risky business to try to pick the next Picasso, and his top-priced sale was for a work about 100 years old. On the other hand, a serious collector will probably want to make some kind of calculation about the "real full-term value" (RFTV) of a given work, i.e. what it will be worth, in real terms in today's money, when 50-75-100 years has elapsed. This can help to put the price of a work that seems aggressively priced into its proper perspective. Over the years I have sold several paintings whose RFTV is undoubtedly $1,000,000+, at prices that on the one hand may have seemed ahead of the market at the time but which on the other hand represented a big discount to the eventual RFTV.
April 11, 2006
Bloomberg reports on the underground liquor-bottling complex near Kursk Station that is being refurbished to house Moscow's leading contemporary galleries.
April 04, 2006
Recent events in Moscow bespeak the rapid growth of interest in contemporary Russian art. On 29 March Marat Guelman presented his new art fund, the aim of which is to develop the market by giving artists financial support for ambitious projects. The first beneficiaries include AES group, Dmitri Gutov, Aleksandr Kosolapov, Kazakh artist Erbol Meldibekov, Georgi Ostretsov, the Blue Noses, Avdei Ter-Oganyan, Vasili Tsagolov. The fund is sponsored by Aleksandr Sumzikov and oligarch Viktor Bondarenko. The following day, on 30 March the new "Innovation" prizes were presented in Moscow (see gif.ru, in Russian), the prize for best work of art going to Aleksei Kallima (another Guelman protege) for his painting Terek-Moscow, a huge football scene intended to be viewed under ultra-violet light. It was shown in London last year at the exhibition "Moscow Breakthrough".

There is in fact already a market in early works (i.e. pieces that are 10-15 years old) by the leading figures of the contemporary scene; a key dealer here is curator Olga Lopoukhova, working out of her gallery at the ArtStrelka complex. Also noteworthy in this context is the current exhibition at Sandmann, Germany, of works from the early 90s by Evgeni Dybsky.

So, here for your enjoyment is Guelman Foundation stependiary Dima Gutov's Blue Girl (oil on canvas, 70 x 50, 2003). The shade of blue marks her out as a member of the intelligentsia ;) underlined by the fact that she is holding a copy of Jean-Luc Nancy's Corpus (in the Russian edition).
April 04, 2006 in Contemporary art|Permalink
March 29, 2006
The installation by artists Andrei Rudev and Sergei Bratkov of a flock of penguins atop a former church building, now the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic, near the town of Vladimir has been taken down on the orders of the St P Culture Committee. LiveJournal user dkdent took the photo below (via vash_pasha). The installation seems unprovocative enough to my Western eyes: is Russia becoming more conservative about the boundaries of artistic expression?
March 29, 2006 in Contemporary art|Permalink
March 28, 2006
The artist Dmitri Vrubel has started a blog at LiveJournal (in Russian), and at the time of writing he's posting energetically. Vrubel created the famous mural on the Berlin Wall that shows a kiss between Leonid Brezhnev and Eric Honecker (this work also exists in oil-on-canvas).
Vrubel's blog is another contribution to the expanding LiveJournal tusa (scene/party) that already features leading galerists, artists, critics and art historians.
We interrupt this post for a message to a scholar of the future:
"As someone who has trawled through the tomes in the Lenin Library and elsewhere while researching my books, and who has felt the particular scholarly anguish of having to leave unread potentially useful material because of time constraints, I sympathise with YOU, the art historian of the future, currently reading the IZO archive, because you have the impossible task of wading through the exploding amount of material available by and about today's artists."
What actually will be the result for art history of this unencompassable quantity of documentation? Perhaps we will get used to multiple competing histories of the the same artists, shows, periods, each history based on the analysis of completely different material.
March 24, 2006
Igor Markin is one of the pioneering collectors of contemporary Russian art. He has put some of the best works from his collection on the web.
mrs--lovett has provided a LiveJournal report on Lena Sorokina's show Contested Spaces in Post-Soviet Art (part in Russian, part in English).
UPDATE: mrs--lovett is now working "friends only".
March 22, 2006
At Princeton University, Mir Iskusstva: Russia's Age Of Elegance shows early C20 works by members of The World Of Art from the Russian Museum collection (until June 11). Lena Sorokina's contemporary show Contested Spaces in Post-Soviet Art opens to the public at Sidney Mishkin Gallery (Baruch College, 135 East 22 Street, New York, NY 10010; tel: 646 660 6652) on 24 March.
March 19, 2006
Where is Russian contemporary art at? The genius of the 90s, Oleg Kulik, now comes across as an old master, making works that are ever-more elegant. The provincials have invaded Moscow: the Blue-Noses, film-makers and performers from Siberia, are probably the notable artists of the last year. The 'South Russian Wave' from Rostov-on-Don, including Valeri Koshlyakov, Sasha Sigutin, Yuri Shabelnikov has also made an impact. Koshlyakov is a gifted 'painterly' painter whose work has  enjoyed a particular vogue in the context of the worldwide 'back to painting' movement; he has been assisted by  superb support from his Paris-based dealer Olga Golovanova. But most influential today, perhaps, are Vinogradov and Dubosarski, whose colourful vulgar technically adept canvases have earned them a small fortune over the last couple of years, penetrating bastions of western taste-making such as the Saatchi collection. Many young artists, recent graduates of the Surikov Institute et al, are churning out paintings influenced by V and D; in this context an original young thinker such as Viktor Alimpiev is rare and should be watched.
March 19, 2006 in Contemporary art|Permalink
March 18, 2006
The Central House of the Artist (TsDKh) is filled with the art fair TsDKh 2006 - Contemporaries. It's an uneasy event, in which the majority of space us given over to the artists' unions still existing in Russia and various former Soviet republics. In this context the old pre-1991 distinctions still apparently obtain: artists from the Baltic are funky and cutting-edge (a work called Compulsion, artist unknown, at the Estonian Artists' Union show,  below), whereas those from Central Asia are acutely aware of national colour.
Meanwhile at the Artefakt mini-mall on Prechistenka an alliance of dealers calling themselves Sodruzhestvo (Alliance) held their first auction. The tendency for secondary-market dealers to stage auctions is increasing, but most such auctions, including this, suffer because most of the art on offer is not fresh to the market, having been hanging around on the dealers' walls for some time. However, good pieces can do well. Viktor Ivanov's small 1970s variation of a  painting in the RUSSIA! show, depicting him and other Severe Style artists in Rome's famous Cafe Greco, recently fetched $39,000 at a SovCom sale in Moscow. Here at Sodruzhestvo a small Ilya Tabenkin still-life, good but not his best, did well.
March 10, 2006
Sincerely yours. If we contrast the New Alex Melamid with the New Vitaly Komar, they seem so very different from one another and I wonder: how did they stay "married" for so long?
February 16, 2006
Visited the opening of Fiziki i Liriki (Scientists and Poets)at Marat Guelman’s gallery. The theme is the eternal dualism of art and science. This may be traced back to the Ancient Greeks, of course: in an echo of it today, the Moscow Times reports that jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky has asked to be transferred from sewing duty to scientific research.
February 16, 2006 in Contemporary art|Permalink
February 15, 2006
A plethora of upcoming Russian-interest shows in New York: Lena Sorokina's survey at Baruch College, CUNY; auctions at Sotheby's and Christies, Sotheby's sale including contemporary art (a charity affair arranged by Stella Gallery) and a non-auction selling sale based on the stables of leading Moscow galleries Guelman, Aidan and XL. Yours truly is also negotiating to show a number of Moscow artists in New York in the near future.
Russian modern and contemporary is clearly going to be pushed hard by Sothebys this year: does the recent purchase by Christies expert Katharine Burton of a painting by Kerim Ragimov at the Bologna art fair indicate that Christies may explore this area as well? Or doers she just think it's a good investment? Or does she just like it? ;-)
Meanwhile, the Thiessen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid surveys the Russian avant-garde 1907-12.
A meeting with New York-based curator Lena Sorokina who is preparing a show of Russian artists for Baruch College, City University of New York. To my mind this could be the most interesting of recent and upcoming offerings of contemporary Russian art in NY: Sorokina is casting the net beyond Moscow to St Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Kiev, Kazakhstan. Opens late March. Dima Gutov, a participant, says the show will feature "extreme left" art, although I'm not sure what this means in a Rusian context, let alone translated to NY.
February 15, 2006 in Contemporary art, Exhibitions|Permalink
February 04, 2006
In New York yesterday evening I met with Russian art scholar and Columbia University teacher Masha Chlenova, who is writing the dozens of new entries needed to accompany the works added to RUSSIA! in Bilbao. She says that contemporary works by Blue Noses, Valeri Koshlyakov, Ter-Oganyan have been added, plus a large early piece by Komar & Melamid. Also on the way, I understand, is a large installation by Alexander Brodsky.
Plainly the Guggenheim is doing its best to rectify the obvious weakness of the contemporary section of this vast survey. Unfortunately It seems to have passed up my humble suggestion to include a number of important contemporary works: Rostislav Lebedev's classic work of non-conformist art Made In The USSR (1979); Geli Korzhev's Mutants, 1980s-92 [below]; Leonid Lamm's famous image of Butyrka Prison (below); and something - almost anything - by Ilya Tabenkin.
February 04, 2006 in Contemporary art, Exhibitions|Permalink
January 26, 2006
Commentary on recent Russian shows in New York (mainly) and London (briefly), focussing on Russia-2. Like other commentators, Paul Abelson seems to find that the political caricaturing (of Russia-2) undermines the art:
Still, the exhibit falls short largely on artistic merits. Usurping and caricaturing the reputed symbols of Russia 1 resulted in a grotesque facsimile of the reality the artists sought to undermine. The clones of Lenin, Christ and the imperial eagle teach the visitor little about Putin’s Russia, and even less about the authors’ declared aspiration to build an open and superior alternative.
On the other hand, we live in a media-driven society in which news aspires to the status of drama, and drama (as any fule Aristotle kno [© Geoffrey Williams]) is conflict. Without the "opposition-to-Putin" theme would the show have got the same attention?
Masha Shubina, who recently had a successful show at Fine Art Gallery, Moscow (read a review or view a podcast) writes from India to say she is working on a new project incorporating Indian motifs. One of her paintings was sold this month at the Sovereign Art Prize auction in London.
January 26, 2006 in Contemporary art|Permalink
January 25, 2006
Gallery Visio at the University of Missouri-St Louis is showing paintings by the elephants who work at the Elephant Art Academies established in Thailand by Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. Prices range from $350 to $1500. Komar and Melamid set up the first Elephant Academy in 1998. Melamid's wife Katya Arnold, a painter and illustrator who (not many people know this...) took part in the 1974 Bulldozer Exhibition in Moscow, recently published a book on these elephants. As I recall, at least one of the elephants Katya profiles can paint flowers. More.
January 24, 2006
Marat Gelman dubs his new project The New Reprobates  (Novye Plokhie). They're the artists who "annoy ordinary people". They  deliberately  break taboos, upsetting aesthetes, moralists, human-rights activists. So how does such activity differs from the conventional avant-garde desire to epater les bourgeois (for example, Wikipedia tells us that today's Western avant-gardists Damian Hirst, Maurizio Cattalan, Matthew Barney "deal with taboo images and ideas")? Firstly, in Russia there is no bourgeoisie and hasn't been for a long time, so artists used to have to annoy the Communist Party and Artists' Union and now they have to annoy the Church or nationalist groups instead.  Secondly, the risks are - or at least seem - higher for Russian artists in the context of Putin's political revanchism. But maybe not. More on Gelman's project here (in Russian).
January 24, 2006 in Contemporary art|Permalink
January 12, 2006
The Moscow Times reviews galerist Marat Guelman's Russia-2, first shown at the Moscow Biennale, later hosted at White Box, New York. Touches on the question, does art produced for a political project of this kind have built-in obsolescence? In New York the the politics looked pretty innocuous; but within Russia a court case against the show, including a demand for 5 million roubles ($180,000) damages, for various offences such as insulting President Putin, was initiated by aggrieved citizens in November 2005. How serious the case turns out to be remains to be seen.
Movies
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Works of Art
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Dmitri Krasnopevtsev, Still-Life, 1940s. A beautiful early still-life; the shell foreshadows motifs of Krasnopevtsev's mature work. Silvery chiaroscuro, immaculate realism. Provenance: the family of the artist.
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Irina Zatulovskaya, Umbrellas, 2005. An intriguing, almost whimsical image, rooted and made serious by the compact monumentality of the chosen format and the technique, oil on rusting iron.
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Yuri Zharkikh, Self-Portrait, 1975. A large, expressionistic canvas by one of the most distinctive of the 70s Nonconformists. Zharkikh, a victim of the 1974 "Bulldozer" show, seems to reference icon-painting. He portrays himself as a Christ-like figure, his luminous image emerging from a rich and inventive painterly surface.
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Georgi Rublev, Female Nude. Rublev has emerged as one of the most impressive artists of the period of the Veliki Perelom (Great Breakthrough), 1927-37. This is an early work, probably dating from the late 1920s.
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Dmitri Plavinski, untitled etching, 1970s. A beautiful fantasy by one of the most sought-after of contemporary Russian artists. Sourced from a major diplomatic/European aristocratic family who purchased from the artist in the 70s. Signed lower right.
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Natalia Nesterova, The City P, 2005. A hermetic lyricism: The artist's paean to one of the great artistic cities.
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Rostislav Lebedev's Red Interior dates from the 1970s. A sumptuous mixed-media work incorporating a concrete block into the mixed abstract and figurative imagery; the technique appears to mix oil and household gloss paints. A classic work of prime-period Non-conformism.
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Vitali Komar, Cleaning Lady, 1960s. A rare early work by Komar, shown at his first joint show with Alex Melamid, held at the Bluebird Cafe in Moscow. A rare work and enigmatic image, perhaps part of the series titled Retrospectivism.
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Dmitri Nalbandyan, Portrait of Stalin, ca. 1950 (pencil on paper, in artist's original frame). Nalbandyan came to exemplify the "genre of the leader" in Soviet art. This classic image of Stalin was sourced from the artist's studio in the 1980s.
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Isaak Izraelevich Brodsky, A Meeting of the Revolutionary Military Council, ca. 1925 (oil on canvas, 89 x 122 cm). A rare early revolutionary painting by Brodsky (possibly unique on the private market): a characteristically detailed ceremonial record of a meeting chaired by People's Commissar Kliment Voroshilov. Many of the people portrayed in this painting were subsequently repressed as "Enemies of the People" and the work was hidden from the 1930s onwards.
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Three against Hitler. A Window of TASS from 1945, hand printed through hand-cut stencils. Not to be confused with a mass-produced poster: very vibrant, very rare, by the Soviet Union's most brilliant satirical artists.
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Mariya Nesterova, USSR, 1930s (oil and tempera on board, 94 x 66 cm). An extraordinary evocation in the style of the Palekh ministure of some of the extravagant projects of the 1930s - the Palace of the Soviets (never built), the giant Maksim Gorky plane (it crashed on its first flight), the new riverboats, combine harvesters.
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