Yuri Zlotnikov

Exhibition of Yury Zlotnikov works from the collection of Michail Alshibay, Mark Kurtser, Museum ART4 and Tsukanov Family Foundation

Outstanding Russian artist Yuri Zlotnikov, one of the leaders of Nonconformism, died in Moscow on 25 September 2016. Fortunately major museum collections in Russia and abroad acquired his work during his lifetime, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, where the exhibition ‘Kollektsia! Contemporary Art in the USSR and Russia 1950-2000’ opened on 13 September and includes several works by Zlotnikov. The project ‘Kollektsia! Contemporary Art in the USSR and Russia 1950-2000’ is an unprecedented donation to one of the most important museums in France from the Vladimir Potanin Charitable Foundation and more than 40 Russian collectors, including Vladimir and Ekaterina Semenikhin, the Tsukanov Family Foundation, Tamaz and Iveta Mansherov, Inna Bazhenova and Dmitry Samorukov, Nick Ilyin and others. The role of patrons of art and collectors in creating museums and augmenting their collections is impossible to overestimate. This tradition has an age-old history and continues to this day. The Yuri Zlotnikov exhibition at MAMM is based on works in the private collections of the Tsukanov Family Foundation, Mikhail Alshibai, Mark Kurtser and the ART4 Museum. On the eve of its 40th anniversary the Centre Georges Pompidou has declared 2016 as the year of the donor, bearing the slogan ‘En hommage au donateur’ (‘In Honour of the Donor’). We now declare the year 2017 – the year of MAMM’s 20th anniversary – the year of patrons of art, and we are pleased to continue our collaboration with the private collectors involved in the Yuri Zlotnikov exhibition. Yuri Zlotnikov was born in 1930. After returning from evacuation he studied from 1943 at the Moscow Middle Art School, a renowned teaching facility from which the majority of graduates then entered the Surikov Institute, part of the Academy of Arts. Ilya Kabakov, for instance, studied there at the same time as Yuri Zlotnikov. The onset of Yuri Zlotnikov’s creative activities coincided with Khrushchev’s Thaw in the late 1950s to early 1960s. This was a period marked by artistic freedom. The Pablo Picasso Exhibition opened in the Pushkin Museum in 1956; exhibitions of international modern art were held in Moscow as part of the World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957; and the public were able to familiarise themselves with the work of Jackson Pollock and other American artists at the Sokolniki American National Exhibition in 1959. The Thaw provided a chink in the Iron Curtain, giving an opportunity to see works by leaders of world art, and also to at least partly re-establish ties with the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde, which in turn influenced the development of art culture worldwide. Young artists began to reject the canons of Socialist Realism that dominated Soviet art from the mid-1930s. They sought a new plastic language and new foundations on which to build their individual creative worlds. The epoch of ‘physicists and lyricists’ and a general enthusiasm for the achievements of science and belief in its limitless possibilities led Yuri Zlotnikov to create an original concept, combining advances in mathematics, logic and psychology. ‘My direction in art has a semantic and scientific character,’ the artist once said. ‘I investigated the possibilities of how painting might exert influence on human thought.’ While working on the ‘Signals’ series he spent some considerable time in the laboratory of the Botkin Hospital, where he studied electrocardiograms and bio-currents. There Yuri Zlotnikov became acquainted with two eminent Soviet scholars – the neurophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein, and distinguished Soviet psychologist and participant in the psychotechnical movement Solomon Gellerstein. Works from Yuri Zlotnikov’s famous ‘Signals’ series, part of which is now included in the Centre Georges Pompidou collection, have become the semantic and emotional focus of the MAMM exhibition. Yuri Zlotnikov’s abstracts exerted immense influence on the development of Russian contemporary art in the second half of the 20th century. The artist, who kept working until the end of his life, always retained a freshness of perception and ‘lightness of touch’. ‘Signals’ and other works by Yuri Zlotnikov have the capacity to ‘charge’ the creative impulse of both the prepared viewing public and those who see them for the first time. This display of works by Yuri Zlotnikov continues the cycle of Russian contemporary art exhibitions organised by our museum in collaboration with private collectors. These have included the 2013 exhibition by Oscar Rabin, ‘Graphics 1950s-1960s’ from the collections of Alexander Kronik and the Tsukanov Family Foundation; an exhibition in 2014 in memory of Vladimir Yakovlev from the collections of Alexander Kronik and Leonid Ogarev, ‘Sometimes a Dream is Like Sight…’; and the exhibition ‘Pierre Brochet’s Puzzle’ in 2015. We are planning a continuation of this programme for our anniversary year in 2017.