The Harriman Institute at Columbia University is pleased to present PERESTROIKA + 20: Selections from the Kolodzei Collection of Russian and Eastern European Art, an exhibition featuring works by contemporary Russian artists.
The works chronicle Russian culture over the past 20 years and represent a wide range of artistic trends as diverse as Russia itself. These paintings, sculptures, and digital works, executed in traditional and contemporary artistic techniques, reflect Russian art’s creative variety.
Many of the contemporary artists now on view in the Guggenheim’s Russia! exhibit are also represented in PERESTROIKA + 20, including Komar and Melamid, Eric Bulatov, Oleg Vassiliev, Natalia Nesterova, Tatyana Nazarenko, Eduard Shteinberg, and Vladimir Nemukhin. Comprised of works created since 1986, PERESTROIKA + 20 explores current Russian artistic ideas and trends from artists who began their careers during Khrushchev’s “thaw” of the late 1950s and participated in the first unofficial exhibitions, as well as younger artists who began working during perestroika (late 1980’s) and the post-perestroika periods. The selected works showcase the diversity of contemporary and modern Russian art. Other artists featured include Farid Bogdalov, Dmitry Gerrman, Vladimir Kanevsky, Alexander Kozhin, Alexander Ney, Olge Slepov, Leonid Borisov, Olga Bulgakova, Marina Karpova, Marina Kolotvina, Valentina Lebedeva, Tatiana Levitskaia, Valerii Pianov, Alexander Sitnikov, and Vladimir Ovchinnikov.
The Kolodzei Art Foundation, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1991, organizes nonprofit exhibitions in museums and cultural centers in the United States, Russia, and others countries, provides art supplies to Russian artists, and coordinates Russian-American cultural exchanges. The foundation, with offices in New Jersey and Moscow, organizes thematic shows that explore the considerable artistic depth of the Kolodzei Collection of Russian and Eastern European Art. The collection is one of the world’s largest private art collections, comprising 7,000 art objects, including paintings, drawings, and sculptures by more then 300 artists from Russia and the former Soviet Union. The collection chronicles more than four decades of Russian and Soviet non-conformist art from the post-Stalin era to the present.
