For our presentation at Art Paris, we will show a selection of these historic contemporary figures, in some cases introducing their work to Western audiences who may only be aware of their art through publication, along with select masterpieces of the Avant-Garde that are thematically related to the more contemporary works on view, such as those dealing with both Eastern motifs and landscape as well as themes of religion and mythology.
Aladdin Garunov (b. 1956) Since the mid-1980s, when Aladdin Garunov relocated to Moscow from his native Degstan to study art, graduating from what was then the Stroganov Higher Art Industry College, the artist has forged a largely independent body of work, eschewing the prevailing Postmodernist styles of Perestroika artists, who celebrated and critiqued both the fall of Communism and Russia’s romantic attachment to its deeply embedded visual icons. Instead, Garunov followed his interest in Modernism and its language of abstract painting, which sought to be the secular equivalent of spirituality formerly found in figurative, religious art. To that, he brought the non-objective traditions of art in the Muslim world, which richly combines pattern and language but completely avoids figuration. Finally, Garunov has created a further layer of intricacy by occupying the language of painting but displacing paint as a material, instead using everything from discarded Asian carpets to industrial materials such as rubber, which refers in part to the oil economies of the countries neighboring Dagestan. The result is a body of work that looks both familiar and exotic, Minimalist in conception but robust in execution, with surprising combinations of fur, Arabic calligraphy, and found objects that remind us of the Combine painting strategies of Rauschenberg. The gallery will present a selection of works from 2007 – 2012.
Valentin Khrusch (1943 – 2005) Khrusch was one of the central figures of non-conformist and underground art in Odessa, and later Moscow, emerging in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a major organizer of the so-called “open air” exhibitions that hung, sometimes only for hours, on fences along the street and later was the central catalyst in Odessa and Moscow behind the “apartment exhibitions”—shows of unofficial artists that took place in people’s homes. His works, which move seamlessly between figuration and abstraction, are enormously important to the history of Russian contemporary art, but due to their “unofficial” status, he remained better known in Ukraine and Russia than in the West, although there are major holdings of his works in the United States museum and private collections concerned with non-conformist art. He has been widely exhibited and collected in the countries where he worked, and has exhibited in Paris at UNESCO. We will present several major, exemplary paintings by him from 1970s – 1980s.
Evgeny Rukhin (1943 – 1976) Born in Saratov and active in Leningrad until his death, Rukhin is perhaps the best known non-conformist artist for Western audiences, especially other artists working in the 1960s and 1970s. His assemblage paintings in a quasi-Pop/ Expressionist mode were akin to works by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg , though his abstractions are more like apocalyptic wastelands of contemporary culture than they are commentaries on consumerism and advertising icons. Like other non-conformist artists, he explored religious subjects, which were forbidden in art during Soviet times, as a form of protest and opposition. We will present a selection of major works shown for the first time in the West.
Ülo Sooster (1924 – 1970) Born and trained in Estonia, the enigmatic artist Ülo Sooster spent much of the 1940s in a Soviet labor camp. He moved to Moscow in the late-1950s and began making works in the underground art movement there that are distinguished by his predisposition toward Surrealist landscapes inspired in part by the art of Max Ernst, Magritte, and Picasso. He dies at the age of 45, hence his career was short and his works are extremely rare. His influence as a teacher was significant; perhaps his most famous student was the conceptualist Ilya Kabakov. Widely collected in Russia, Scandinavia, and the Baltic countries, his art is little known outside of those countries and a discreet coterie of private collectors. We will present three rare paintings from the 1960s.