"Remembrance" A Celebration of Russian Art Closes April 22, 2011 in New York City

Online, March 27, 2011 (Newswire.com) - The highly-acclaimed private exhibition of Easter European Art draws to a successful close at AG Contemporary Art, NYC.

The "Remembrance" exhibit at Alexandre Gertsman Contemporary Art gallery features works by 18 of the foremost Russian artists of their generation: Grisha Bruskin, Ivan Chuikov, Vladimir Clavijo-Telepnev, Semyon Faibisovich, Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Vasily Kafanov, Komar & Melamid, Tatiana Nazarenko, Natalya Nesterova, Boris Orlov, Mikhail Roginsky, Leonid Sokov, Oleg Vassiliev, and Andrei Volkov.

These artists grew up in the former Soviet Union and now work and often live in the United States, France, Germany, or a deeply-changed Russia. They have been exhibited in the most well-known venues of the contemporary scene, from the Documenta in Kassel, to the Biennales in Venice, Moscow, Istanbul, Sao Paolo, Sarijah, and New York's Whitney, and are shown in prestigious museums ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA and The Guggenheim Museum here in New York, to the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Tate Modern Gallery in London, Centre Georges Pompidou's Museum of Modern Art in Paris, Shtedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Ludwig Museum of Modern Art in Cologne, The State Tretyakov Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow, and The Hermitage and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. They are winners of the Russia's Triumph Award and the recipients of the National Award in Fine Arts of the Russian Federation, as well as carry titles of the National Artists of the Russian Federation, while Ilya Kabakov was listed among 10 Best Living World Artists of Our Time in 2000, and Komar and Melamid were named among 100 Best World Artists of the XX Century.

Alexandre Gertsman Contemporary Art has the USA's largest collection of paintings, sculptures, photographs, works on paper, and mixed-media works of art by over 50 contemporary, Russian-born artists. "This is practically the only art gallery in the USA where the most important artists of the Soviet and post-Soviet time are represented," wrote the New Russian Word newspaper.

Mr. Gertsman, who was the Founder and President of the International Foundation of Russian and Eastern European Art (INTART), as well as the American Friends of The Tretyakov Gallery Foundation, has curated, over 17 years, more than 50 traveling museum exhibitions of contemporary Russian art at major museums throughout the world, including The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, The Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Aachen, Germany, The Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, The

Art Museum of the Yeshiva University in New York, and the National Jewish Museum in Washington. He also acted as a consultant to those museums as well as corporations and private collectors, was Member of the Leadership Committee for the highly acclaimed RUSSIA! Exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, organized major fundraising and cultural events - his last Gala took place in Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, before finally deciding to open his own gallery in Manhattan's SOHO.

Alexandre Gertsman Contemporary Art located on Broadway, several blocks away from The New Museum. It took two years of remodeling to convert an old abandoned factory into an ultra-modern, elegant, 3000 square foot gallery space. Alexandre Gertsman, a former architect, collaborated on the design with the talented New York - Berlin-based architect Annette Goderbauer, who had worked for years with the award-winning American architect Steven Holl. With a main exhibition space, an adjacent smaller gallery, and a system of moving walls, the space was also designed to be convertible to accommodate exclusive private and cultural events.

The art contained in the "Remembrance" exhibition is expressive of this unique cultural transition. It is impossible to separate these artists and their works from the cultural heritage that is their individual and national history. For this reason, contemporary Russian art of any medium or subject is intrinsically and undeniably nostalgic, meaning that there is an element to any sort of artistic comment on the present direction of Russian culture that is necessarily backward looking

"Alexandre Gertsman's use of the word nostalgia in connection with this complex, conceptually based art celebrates the death of the old state-ordered Socialist Realism, but while deploring or satirizing the past it also looks back with the failed ideas of its Communist revolution. 'While fiercely denying past culture - a denial of the so-called 'democratic' but all-too-suppressive regime - they carry the traditional Russian secret respect for a strong state; a habit of dealing with the absence of the freedom to choose and thus of using allegorical language.' " (Grace Glueck, The New York Times)

REMEMBRANCE, "this intelligently conceived show, brings together work by artists who grew up in the Soviet Union. Alexandre Gertsman's point-that nostalgia for the Soviet past unifies much of contemporary Russian art's range of styles and practices-is well taken." (Nicole Rudick, Artforum magazine)

Contact:
Alexandre Gertsman
646-344-1325
E-mail: [email protected]