Still Art Collection. Selected works

Still Art Collection. Selected Works
Curator of the Collection: Natalia Grigoryeva-Litvinskaya

Within the framework of the ‘Private Collections at MAMM’ program, the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents an exhibition titled ‘Still Art Collection. Selected Works’, that includes photographs by the most influential and renowned photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Our museum has existed for over 20 years, and in that time we have put on personal exhibitions by Richard Avedon, Erwin Blumenfeld, Guy Bourdin, Patrick Demarchelier, William Klein, Annie Leibovitz, Steve McCurry, Norman Parkinson, Jean-Marie Perier, Herb Ritts, Albert Watson, Horst P. Horst, Elliott Erwitt and others. Today, however, for the first time in a single exhibition space, the works of all these legendary photographers have been brought together, as well as works by Giovanni Gastel, Douglas Kirkland, Michel Comte, Miles Aldridge, Denis Piel, Noe Sendas, Steve Schapiro and other stars.

‘Collecting is an art’ — that is the slogan of the Still Art Foundation. A collection is a self-portrait of an engaged person who is open to new impressions and new knowledge, a person who is growing and developing. In creating a collection, its authors create an entire artistic universe where all the elements within it are engaged in a continual dialogue, resonating with and enhancing one another.

By no means every combination of renowned names can claim to be a Collection. Its public recognition and contribution to the general context of world artistic culture are important.

The idea of creating the Still Art collection came to Yelena Karisalova almost 15 years ago. The collection presented by the Karisalova family, painstaking work with it, participation in exhibition projects, the organization of our own exhibitions at the finest museums in Russia, a continual search for new names of interest in the world art space and a desire to add to and develop the collection allows us to assert that the collection of the Still Art Foundation will occupy a worthy niche in the art of photography of the 20th century.

At the heart of the collection lies the fashion photography of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Foundation’s goal is not just to introduce the public to cult photographers who have worked and continue to work in this sphere — the key aim is to show this genre in development, from the beginning of the last century to our own time in all its fullness and variety. It is for this reason that alongside the works of pioneers — Richard Avedon, Erwin Blumenfeld, Guy Bourdin and William Klein — the collection includes works by their followers and students who have become today’s classics of world photography.

The exhibition of works from the collection of the Still Art Foundation will stun the imaginations of the most sophisticated audiences and will be a wonderful Christmas present for all lovers of photography.

The exhibition features the texts of Natalia Grigoryeva-Litvinskaya.