Zimmerli russian collection series#

Other artists dwell on the impact of Western-style consumerism in Russia during and after perestroika. It explores the evocative spirituality of abstract imagery, a subject that was immensely popular among Russian philosophers and avant-garde artists at the turn of the 20th century. This is an especially good work by the artist, an important figure in the nonconformist period art scene. Perhaps the most important work in the exhibition is Mikhail Shvartsman’s “The Voice From Afar (or From a Distance),” a metaphysical abstraction from 1990. The picture, ringed with fur, depicts the writer heroically against a stark background made of lead, possibly a reference to the years he spent in Stalin’s labor camps. Leonid Sokov’s portrait of the writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn combines perceptions of Russia as a country with a rich literary tradition, but also as the home of wild bears.

Zimmerli russian collection series#

The following room is devoted to painting, beginning with a series of works that deal with themes central to Russian culture power, personal freedom, ideology. But there are also pieces by younger, less familiar names, including etchings of architectural subjects by Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, and photographs by Alla Esipovich. The show opens with a selection of photographs, prints and other kinds of works on paper by well-known Russian contemporary artists, among them Ilya Kabakov, Vladimir Nemukhin, Leonid Borisov, Alexander Kosolapov and Francisco Infante. The objects are largely arranged chronologically, with occasional subgroupings around a medium, subject or theme.įUR-FRAMED Solzhenitsyn, an oil portrait by Leonid Sokov, at the Zimmerli museum. It is an intriguing show, mostly contemporary art but with a handful of valuable nonconformist era pieces. To honor that gift, the museum is presenting a selection of about 40 works from the Gruen collection in the back galleries. The contribution also includes documents and an extensive library on Russia art. Then, in 2005, the San Francisco-based collectors Claude and Nina Gruen reached an agreement with the Zimmerli to donate nearly 200 important contemporary works, helping to extend the museum’s Russian holdings from the perestroika period to the present. Overnight the museum became home to the largest collection outside Russia of Soviet nonconformist art, the work that was produced in opposition to state-sanctioned socialist realism. Donated to the Zimmerli in 1991, this wildly generous gift included not just artwork the bulk of it dating from the 1950s to the late ’80s but also important reference and archival material. The largest, most valuable single gift, including some 20,000 artworks by more than 1,000 artists, was the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art. This extraordinary achievement is almost entirely a result of the generosity of private collectors, who have expanded the museum’s collection with substantial gifts. In less than two decades, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum has become a major repository in the United States for the art of Russia and the former Soviet republics.