Russian artists seized Manhattan
ARTinvestment.RU   15 ноября 2008

Once in three museums in New York recently opened exhibition of works by contemporary artists from Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union

New Yorkers care to the artist from Russia. Recently, in three galleries in Manhattan have opened the exhibition, presenting the American public works four Russian authors. The style and technique of their work vary widely, but they have one - they all grew up in the Soviet Union and now living and working abroad.

artist from St. Petersburg Danja Akulin shows his virtuoso pencil drawings of Mimi Ferzt Gallery. Provocative paintings and sculptures Simon Okshteyna - born in the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi - can be seen in the Stefan Stux Gallery. A photography and installation by Alina and Jeff Bliumis, also arrived in the United States from the Soviet Union, on display at Andrea Meislin Gallery.

The existence of such exhibitions demonstrates the increasing market interest in the work of artists from Russia and other former Soviet Socialist Republics. It also promotes the growth of prices for Russian products at auctions, and great media interest in wealthy Russian collectors. «Now, if you eksponiruete works in New York the artist from the former Soviet Union, the public interest is provided to you», - Approves the art dealer and gallery owner Stephen Staks (Stefan Stux).

It is not the only New York gallery, benefiting from demand for Russian artists. The autumn season in the Lehmann Maupin gallery opened an exhibition of paintings of absurd Alexei V. Kallima" Kallima from Grozny, where the author has depicted the Chechen women parashyutistok. Around the same time in the gallery Foxy Production exhibited black-and-white photographs and video of Moscow artist Olga Chernysheva . In March this year, Barbara Gladstone Gallery presented a picture of the public Andro Vekua - he was born in Sukhumi, and now lives and works in Berlin. And Marianne Boesky Gallery in the exhibition videoproizvedeny Trubkovicha Cohn, who works in New York, and was born in Moscow.

According to Andrew Servittsa (Andrew Sarewitz) - gallery director Mimi Ferzt in SoHo, which specializes in Russian art since 1993, not giving the audience a desire to visit each new exhibition. Besides, most of the artists whose work has recently been exhibited in New York, culturally are Russians, but living and working abroad, and because their work is of interest to collectors around the world.

Shimon Okshteyn was born in 1951 in Chernivtsi. In 1970 he graduated from art school in Odessa Grekova behalf, and in 1979 moved to New York, where living and working so far. His works are in collections in the New York Museum of Contemporary American Art, the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum and the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. In the past year, several of his works exhibited in Russia: Moscow Center for Contemporary Art M'ARS, in the Marble Palace Russian Museum, as well as the Fair «Art Moscow».

At Shimon Okshteyna in Stefan Stux Gallery, entitled Dangerous Pleasures ( «Dangerous pleasure»), presents giperrealisticheskie picture of the wizard, as well as sculptures and installations made in the hybrid technology. All of these new works created in the most recent. Like the earlier works, they always attract and shock the audience. Here you can see Naturalist embodiment heroin, cocaine and ecstasy tablets, with a carefully drawn on the surface of the mirrors. In addition, the exhibit includes familiar to Russian audiences of the classic Dutch and Flemish still life in bright, brilliant, pompous frame, often contradictory manner. In his works Okshteyn creates complex hybrids in which the lost sense of time and place and a mixture of real and fantastic.

Danja Akulin , whose work is exhibited at Mimi Ferzt Gallery, was born in 1977 in St. Petersburg, the same art school graduate named Serova. In 2000, enrolled at the Berlin University of Arts, where he was in the studio of a distinguished neoekspressionista Georg Baselitz (George Baselitz), who believes his student one of the most talented and promising young artists. Akulin now lives and works in Berlin, and occasionally comes to Moscow with the exhibitions. The last of these, known as the «signs», was held last year in the gallery «Triumph».

Danja Akulin works in a very unusual technique. His works, he performs exclusively with pencil on paper, which is bonded to the canvas. On some sheets the artist also causes high photo and sometimes zasvechivaet paper. Unusual and the size of the work. Traditionally, we perceive the image as something rather modest in scope, but the drawings Akulin ranging from 50 x 50 cm to 2 x 3 meters, more typical of the paintings.

As recognized by the artist himself, he tried to work with a variety of visual means, was a sculpture and painting, but eventually concluded that the pencil drawings have a much greater expressiveness. The line held a pencil, in the opinion of Akulin much more informative and interesting than the swab or the brush border of convergence of two colors on canvas. It enables the artist depicts the simplest of the world: a window, a chair, wood - and is willing to transfer their internal structure, so called. «Linear skeleton». In this way, in spite of the vitality, the truth of the picture, the functionality away in the background. Edges becomes the object of aesthetic perception.

Thus, the product of Akulin give viewers the opportunity to download a review of complex topics, and fully immersed in contemplation.

Alina and Jeff Bliumis present their work at Andrea Meislin Gallery. They have many years of living in New York, which moved from Belarus and Moldova, two former Soviet republics. Their creative union formed in 2000 and since then they had a number of successful projects. The artists represent their creative ideas using a variety of visual tools. This high tech - video art, computer graphics and three-dimensional installations, and more traditional: painting, bronze sculpture, and photography.

Recently, artists have undertaken two projects that attempted to draw public attention to issues of social and cultural differences. The first, entitled «The language barrier: Lower Manhattan», the artists have chosen six areas (Park, the Art Fund, gastronome, newsstand, shoe repair shop and hairdresser), and placed there a lot of color «dictionary» foam (each of them the authors independently designed and itemized) who have a physical embodiment of a misunderstanding, disagreement and the need to translate between the various diaspora communities and New York. Another project, which is also known as «The language barrier», Alina and Jeff Bliumis conducted in the vicinity of his shop in a small town Ands, New York State, in the mountains Ketskills. The artists built a «Barrikady» books midst of the color of grass and trees, thereby attempting to link the landscape and the language in which it talk, to join a geographical territory and cultural identity of people living on it.

In the exhibition, which opened at the Andrea Meislin Gallery, includes photos from these two projects, as well as paintings and large-scale installation. It is called Dam Lines and is a beaver statue, cast in bronze life-size set to «barricades» of many books. The pose of animal holding in the paw red flag that sends the viewer to the famous picture of Eugène Delacroix (Eugène Delacroix) «Freedom at barricades». Thus, the artists make beaver in a revolutionary, destroy old (wood) to build something new, and imply that the desire for progress and hard work are prerequisites, not only to create works of art, but also for society as a whole.

Works of Alina and Jeff Bliumis exhibited worldwide, including at the Biennale in Busan (South Korea, 2006), Assab One (Italy), in the Castlefield Gallery (UK), as well as the First and Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. Exhibition at the Andrea Meislin Gallery - the first exhibition of the authors in the United States.

material produced Catherine Onuchin

Sources: bloomberg.com , mimiferzt.com , stuxgallery.com , andreameislin.com , artcast.org , artinvestment.ru