Russian avant-garde Moscow 73, Russian avant-garde Moscow 2023: 50 years apart, eight artists representing two generations of artistic dissent, from the former Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. They are exhibited in Paris for a few weeks.
The Dina Vierny gallery (36 Rue Jacob, 75006 Paris) presents until the end of January “an almost complete reconstruction of the 1973 exhibition in Paris, where five non-conformist artists who had clandestinely fled the USSR were presented for the first time once to the French public by this famous collector and patron,” explains to AFP Dimitri Ozerkov, former curator of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg and curator of the exhibition, himself in exile in France with his family since March 2022. Dina Vierny “searched for them for ten years and finally discovered them in 1969 through the first, Ilya Kabakov – considered the father of Russian conceptual art –, who introduced her to the others”, adds- he.
Paintings, drawings and sculptures by Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Vladimir Yankilevsky and Oscar Rabin adorn the gallery’s original wooden walls and its small rooms preserved in their original state. The Jewish collector and patron, who inspired Aristide Maillol and created the eponymous museum in Paris in 1995, had herself fled Stalin’s Moldova with her family in 1925 before finding refuge in France, recall her grandsons, Pierre and Alexandre Lorquin.
A few hundred meters away, the two young gallery owners opened the Pal Project (39 Rue de Grenelle, 75007 Paris), an exhibition space dedicated to emerging art, which welcomes four other contemporary Russian artists, in their thirties or forties, “ who have also decided to leave Russia and go into exile in France, the United Kingdom or the United States since the start of the war in Ukraine,” according to Mr. Ozerkov. Andreï Kuzbin’s Times of War (paper panels covered with the sole words “the end of the war”, which the artist intends to write until the end of the conflict in Ukraine) are, like his “Cubes” forming small characters in salt dough and Fontainebleau earth, “an attempt, not political but art as an idea, to understand unofficial and protesting Russian art,” says Mr. Ozerkov.
“They question”, just like the characters of Katya Muromtseva, the video of the performer Evgeny Granilshchikov showing a man whose mouth is being cleaned with soap (Soap) or the Cargo 200 of Pavel Otdelnov, “the place of the artist in exile, its heritage and its belonging to a territory,” he adds.
