2024-01-03 10:49:18
In 1973, the exhibition “Russian Avant-Garde: Moscow 1973” was an event in Paris. The gallery owner Dina Vierny, originally from this country, returned to the other side of the Iron Curtain and brought back the works of dissident artists then little known in Europe.
Most were forced to work as illustrators to make a living. However, in private, Ilya Kabakov developed a work of dark and absurd humor and Vladimir Yankilevsky surrealist drawings mixing Venuses and machines. Erik Boulatov painted figures floating on an empty, white or black background, despairing. Oscar Rabine, for his part, had reproduced his own passport in a painting in muted colors, as a symbol of the deprivation of liberty in the USSR. All these artists soon baptized the “anti-conformists” would gradually move to the West and achieve notoriety there.
A selection entrusted to a former curator of the Hermitage Museum
Fifty years after this landmark exhibition, Dina Vierny’s grandsons, Pierre and Alexandre Lorquin, chose to recreate this display in the historic gallery on rue Jacob, while also showing today’s Russian dissidents, in their new gallery, pal project, rue de Grenelle. They entrusted this second project to Dimitri Ozerkov, a curator at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, who went into exile after publicly protesting the invasion of Ukraine.
“As an employee of a large state museum, which began supporting this war in March 2022, I had no choice but to resign. Especially since I headed the contemporary art department where freedom is crucial,” confides this forty-year-old, now settled in France with his family. At pal project, he chose to exhibit four artists – three men and one woman – all born between 1979 and 1990 and who went into exile like him.
Andrei Kuzkin demonstrated in Moscow three days after the invasion of Ukraine with the slogan “No to war!” ». Which led to his being imprisoned. Shortly after, his exhibition, planned at the prestigious Tretyakov Gallery, was canceled. And he ended up leaving his country in September 2022, like 700,000 of his compatriots, to escape the mobilization.
The thousands of lives sacrificed in war inspired him to create a set of interchangeable cubes, some made of compacted earth, others formed of small human masses sculpted from bread dough, a material which evokes, for the artist, both the sacrifice of Christ and also the small works created with crumbs by the prisoners. For Kuzkin, in this terrifying game for blind leaders, everything is linked: the earth provided the wheat that fed men’s cannon fodder and, in the end, it will bury their remains.
At the same time, the artist also exhibits his pages of writing in which he copies dozens of times, every day, like a mantra in different languages, these words “I want the war to end”interspersed with drawings of friendly faces or works that come to mind.
A two-headed eagle devouring each other
The painter Pavel Otdelnov, who took refuge in London, is no less gloomy. His large formats depict ghostly Soviet vestiges – a factory with broken windows, a deserted corridor – but also a wagon lonely in the snow and the night. This latest work is entitled Cargo 200, from the name by which the military has designated, since the war in Afghanistan, the refrigerated convoys bringing back their dead. In her silent outline, in black and white, she addresses to the world a chilling announcement of mourning.
Twenty years younger, Katya Muromtseva lives in exile in New York. Since the outbreak of war, she has exhibited her watercolors of Women in Black Against the War (Women in Black Against the War) in Tokyo and London to raise funds for Ukrainian refugees. At pal project, she presents a large watercolor depicting a chain of wobbling bodies, as if asleep, in blue-green tones reminiscent of camouflage outfits.
Alongside him, Evgeny Granilshchikov exhibits drawings where we see the emblem of the Russian Empire, the two-headed eagle, metamorphose into a clawed monster that devours itself. In a filmed performance Soap, in the manner of a nightmarish soap opera, the artist, exiled since the fall of 2022 in Clermont-Ferrand, tries to protest against war – this word is now banned in Russia – while two anonymous hands mercilessly soap his mouth, until almost suffocating him…
View of the reconstruction of the exhibition “Russian Avant-garde: Moscow 1973” at the Dina Vierny gallery. / Romain Darnaud
The Soviet dissidents that Dina Vierny exhibited in Paris in 1973 experienced similar censorship, whose brief attempts to exhibit in Moscow were quickly interrupted by the police. Fifty later, it is terrifying to see how much history stutters.
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