Chelsea Art
Museum – New York City
February 27th – May
17th 2008
Moscow – New York = Parallel
Play
Selections from the Kolodzei Art
Foundation Collection of Russian
and Eastern European Art.
Curated by Natalia Kolodzei
Thaw: Russian Art From Glasnost
to the Present
Selections from the Guelman
Collection '15G' exhibition at
the Russian Museum, Marble
Palace, Saint Petersburg 2007.
Curated by Marat Guelman and
Juan Puntes
The Chelsea Art Museum – Home of
the Miotte Foundation - is proud
to bring together two seminal
collections of Russian art.
The Kolodzei Collection, founded
by Tatiana Kolodzei in Moscow
during the height of the Cold
War and continued today with her
daughter, Natalia, is one of
world’s largest private
collections of Russian and
Eastern European Art, with over
7,000 pieces by more than 300
artists from Russia and the
former Soviet Union, chronicling
four decades of nonconformist
art from the post-Stalinist era
to the present. The Kolodzei
Collection is a living, open
entity, which continues to grow,
and reflect changes in culture,
while reacting to the variable
nature of contemporary art.
The exhibition Moscow-New
York=Parallel Play:
Selections from the Kolodzei Art
Foundation Collection of Russian
and Eastern European Art was
first shown at the National
Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA)
in Moscow in 2007. The
exhibition highlights the
artistic axis of the two cities,
representing Russian artists
living or working in these two
art capitals and creating with
their art an international
context and distinctive
intellectual plastic Russian
"rhyme" in the international art
community. The works reflect the
major current of Russian
alternative culture and describe
the history of independent, or
“non-conformist,” art processes
and movements from the 1960s to
the present. Artists in the
exhibition include:
Vagrich Bakhchanyan, Petr
Belenok, Eric Bulatov, Ivan
Chuikov, Rimma Gerlovina and
Valeriy Gerlovin, Francisco
Infante, Ilya Kabakov,
Vyacheslav Koleichuk, Vitaly
Komar and Alex Melamid, Dmitri
Krasnopevtsev, Leonid Lamm,
Ernst Neizvestny, Vladimir
Nemukhin, Dmitri Plavinsky,
Oscar Rabin, Leonid Sokov,
Eduard Shteinberg, Oleg
Vassiliev, and Vladimir
Yankilevsky, as well as artists
of the younger generation.
Undoubtedly, politics have
influenced the arts in Russia,
and Marat Guelman, founder of
the M+J Guelman Gallery in
Moscow, has become something of
a legend in his lifetime for
both his support of the arts and
his often provocative political
stance.
The title THAW is based on a
real experienced situation by
the people and the art world in
Russia from the 1960s onwards, a
period of slow, gradual but real
thaw, a defrost of three
quarters of a century’s cultural
freeze that happened not in a
single decade, but over several
decades, culminating in the
period of the 1990s known as
Glasnost.
The '15 G' of the subtitle
refers to the first 15 years of
Marat Guelman's art gallery
activities and how the events
that took place there changed
the artistic panorama of Russia
and helped create a real,
tangible art scene in Moscow.
Radical people who frequented
the gallery as audience,
supporters, sympathisers and as
participating artists were
coined "Guelmanites" - even to
this day. Artists in this
exhibition include:AES+F, Blue
Noses, Vladimir Dubosarsky&
Alexander Vinogradov, Gor Chahal,
Olga&Alexander Florenskie ,
Georgy Ostretsov, Juri
Shabelnikov, Vasili Tsagolov,
Arsen Savadov,Valery Koshlyakov,
Dmitry Gutov, Alexander
Kosolapov, Dmitry Vrubel &
Viktoria Timofeeva, Oleg Kulik,
Erbol Meldibekov, Alexey Kallima,
Avdei Ter-Oganian.
The Chelsea Art Museum
556 West 22nd Street
(at 11th Avenue) Tel:
212.255.0719
New York, NY 10011
http://www.chelseaartmuseum.org
Museum Hours:
Tue-Sat 11am-6pm, Thur 11am-8pm
$8 general/$4
students-seniors/members free
For further information, please
contact:
Press Inquiries:
Nicollette Ramirez
212.255.0719 x108
nicollette@chelseaartmuseum.org
The Chelsea Art Museum - Home of
the Miotte Foundation - (CAM) is
dedicated to showing art from
an international standpoint and
provides an intimate platform
for individual artists and
thematic group shows that may
not find a home in larger art
institutions. In addition, CAM
does exchange programs with
other organizations around the
world. This concept of providing
a platform for artists and ideas
that are not addressed elsewhere
in the U.S. originates from the
Jean Miotte Foundation (housed
at CAM and dedicated to
archiving, preserving,
presenting and making available
for exhibitions the work of Jean
Miotte). Miotte's work is very
much influenced by dance and
music, and the Chelsea Art
Museum also supports this
integration of the arts,
understanding that they work
together and often influence
each other. For more information
visit
http://www.chelseaartmuseum.org
The Kolodzei Art Foundation,
Inc., a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit
public foundation started in
1991, organizes exhibitions and
cultural exchanges in museums
and cultural centers in the
United States, Russia and other
countries, often utilizing the
considerable resources of the
Kolodzei Collection of Russian
and Eastern European Art,
publishes books on Russian art,
and provides art supplies to
Russian artists. The Kolodzei
Collection of Russian and
Eastern European Art consists
of over 7,000 art works,
including paintings, drawings
and sculptures, by more than 300
artists from Russia and the
former Soviet Union.
For additional information visit
http://www.KolodzeiArt.org
or email
Kolodzei@KolodzeiArt.org
The Marat Guelman Gallery is one
of the first and most famous
galleries to appear in the
Post-Soviet Russia. It was
founded in 1990, a year before
the Soviet Union collapsed. Just
as a few other forward-thinking
institutions that emerged in
the 90s, the Gallery not only
provided exhibition space, but
also presented itself as an
intellectual workshop,
developing ideas and concepts
for the art of today's Russia.
For further information visit
http://www.guelman.ru/eng/gallery/
Media Sponsor of the Exhibition:
Russia! Magazine
http://readrussia.com/
