Exhibition: This Leads to Fire: Russian Art From Nonconformism to Global Capitalism, Selections from the Kolodzei Art Foundation Collection (Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY, September 14, 2014 – January 11, 2015)

Exhibition: This Leads to Fire: Russian Art From Nonconformism to Global Capitalism, Selections from the Kolodzei Art Foundation Collection (Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY, September 14, 2014 – January 11, 2015)

Neuberger Museum of Art
735 Anderson Hill Road
Purchase, New York
Opening September 13
https://www.neuberger.org

(Purchase, New York)…. As world attention is riveted by current events in Ukraine, an upcoming exhibition of works by contemporary Russian artists at the Neuberger Museum of Art takes on a new urgency. In This Leads to Fire: Russian Art From Nonconformism to Global Capitalism, Selections from the Kolodzei Art Foundation Collection, on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College from September 14, 2014 to January 11, 2015, the challenges that Russian contemporary artists pose to both Russian and Western culture are vividly portrayed.

This Leads to Fire: Russian Art From Nonconformism to Global Capitalism, Selections from the Kolodzei Art Foundation Collection features work from the 1950s through Glasnost until the present. Exhibition sheds light on challenges artists pose to mainstream Russian culture.

“In the Soviet period, it was the pluralism of the international art world that sustained and inspired these artists, as well as their collective relationships of mutual support, both material and creative,” says curator of the exhibition Sarah Warren, assistant professor of art history at Purchase College, the State University of New York. “Today’s artists are still burdened by the legacy of Soviet Realism and face an increasingly repressive environment.” She adds that though many of the artists have exhibited extensively in the West, this exhibition will reveal the deeper context of the Kolodzeis’ collecting practices, consider the challenges the artists still face, and familiarize viewers with an important yet underappreciated body of work.

This Leads to Fire: Russian Art From Nonconformism to Global Capitalism, Selections from the Kolodzei Art Foundation Collection is organized into five parts that explore the origins of Nonconformist art, the developments of Moscow Conceptualism and Sots Art, the influence of the Russian avant-garde in geometric abstraction, and the coercive legacy of Socialist Realism. It features about 100 works of art—from the 1950s through the period of Glasnost and into the present—from the Kolodzei Art Foundation, one of the most extensive collections of Nonconformist and contemporary Russian art in the world. Among the artists represented are: conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid; Oleg Vassiliev and Erik Bulatov, painters whose works slyly challenged Soviet realities; Nonconformist artists Ernst Neizvestny, Oscar Rabin, Vladimir Nemukhin, and Vladimir Yakovlev; and contemporary artists Tatiana Antoshina, Irene Caesar, Alla Esipovich, Anton S. Kandinsky, Alexandra Dementieva, and Valery Yershov.

Founded in 1991 with the support of American sponsors, the Foundation comprises the joint collection of Tatiana Kolodzei, who organized exhibitions of works by Nonconformist artists in the former Soviet Union, and her daughter Natalia Kolodzei. Today, the collection contains approximately 7,000 paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, photography and video, by more than 300 artists, acquired during four decades of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist art, from the post-Stalinist era to the present.

PROGRAMS & EVENTS Neu First Wednesdays, Wednesday, December 3 4:30 pm
Artist Speak: Vitaly Komar
Vitaly Komar has spent much of his career reacting to what he has called “the overproduction of ideology and its propaganda,” most notably Soviet Socialist Realism. From 1967 to 2003, Komar and Alexander Melamid organized various conceptual projects, ranging from painting and performance to installation, public sculpture, photography, music, and poetry, which form a powerful response to contemporary political and social climates. Komar and Melamid’s work is included in the exhibition This Leads to Fire.

Collecting Art in Russia, Tuesday, November 18, 11 am
Natalia Kolodzei has, with her mother, Tatiana, amassed one of the most extensive collections of Nonconformist and contemporary Russian art in the world. Join Natalia in a conversation about the history of collecting art in Russia.

An interview with the collector published by SHERA member Natasha Kurchanova on the occasion of the exhibition can be found here.

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