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On a windy October night, a Russian television crew and boisterous gallery-goers flocked to three Manhattan openings.
They featured four artists with very different sensibilities but a common heritage: they all came of age in the former Soviet Union and now live abroad.
Danja Akulin’s virtuosic pencil drawings at the Mimi Ferzt Gallery convey his academic training; Shimon Okshteyn goes for shock appeal with provocative paintings and sculptures at the Stefan Stux Gallery; Alina and Jeff Bliumis explore the issue of cultural integration in their photographs and installations at the Andrea Meislin Gallery.
The new gallery shows reflect the market’s growing interest in contemporary artists born in Russia and the former Soviet republics — amid rising prices for Russian artworks sold at auction and intense media interest in ultra-wealthy Russian collectors.
“If today you are showing a New York-based artist from the former Soviet Union, people pay attention,” said Chelsea dealer Stefan Stux. “There’s something of a consequence.”
Artist Alexey Kallima, from Grozny, Chechnya, opened the fall season at the Lehmann Maupin gallery with his absurdist paintings of parachute-jumping Chechen women. Around the same time, Foxy Production featured black-and-white photography and video art by Moscow-based Olga Chernysheva.
Earlier in the year, the Barbara Gladstone Gallery exhibited paintings by Andro Wekua, who was born in Sukhumi, Georgia, and now lives and works in Berlin; Marianne Boesky showed video pieces by the Moscow-born, New York-based artist Kon Trubkovich.
“There’s always a want to find the next new thing,” said Andrew Sarewitz, director of Mimi Ferzt in Soho, which has focused on Russian art since 1993.
While they may be culturally Russian, most of the artists who have recently exhibited in New York live and work abroad, focusing on themes that appeal to collectors from around the world, dealers said. (Bloomberg)
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