Igor Makarewicz: Borisov Museum

The artist was born in Georgia in 1943 and graduated from the All-Union Institute of Cinematography in Moscow in 1968. In the years 1986-1989 he was a member of the artistic group Collective Actions, known for its performance activities, co-creating the Moscow conceptualism movement. The artist's works are currently in many important public collections, of which it is worth mentioning the State Tretyakov Gallery, the National Museum in St. Petersburg, the National Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA) and the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow, the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, as well as in many renowned private collections: in Italy (Paolo Sprovieri and Fabio Sollante), the USA (Charles Cowles), Switzerland, France, Norway and the United Arab Emirates.

Igor Makarewicz often works together with the esteemed artist, privately his wife, Elena Elagina. In Atlas Sztuki we will show a project signed by Igor Makarewicz entitled Borisov Museum, whose curators are Bożena Czubak, president of the Profile Foundation in Warsaw, and Natalia Goncharova, associated with the Moscow National Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA) on a daily basis. However, a few days after the opening of the exhibition at Łódź, the Profile Foundation will show the works of both artists. 

I recommend reading the exhibition catalogue, in which we publish texts by Dr. Jane A. Sharp, an American art historian dealing with scientifically Russian conceptualism, and the aforementioned co-curator of the exhibition, Natalia Goncharova, who in her essay points out that Moscow conceptualism is "a romantic, dreamy and psychoanalytic variant of the international conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s,", and adds: "Without a doubt, the works of Western conceptualists were a model for the creation of a parallel trend in Russia, characterized, however, by its own specificity and original instruments". The whole thing is completed by an interview with Igor Makarewicz conducted by Bożena Czubak, who discovered Igor Makarewicz and Elena Elagina for the Polish audience. In this conversation, Makarewicz compares the work of both to "the work of an archaeologist, absorbed in the study of the ruins of a huge lost civilization", because, as he claims: "The fallen Soviet empire has not yet been thoroughly investigated. Secrecy has given rise to strange phenomena in terms of unofficial culture, which can be compared to living organisms occurring at great depths - their structure is the result of enormous pressure. This context is both an advantage and a disadvantage. And that is why the logic of our work is slightly ››displaced‹‹”.

In Atlas Sztuki over the past twelve years, we have twice shown the works of the Russian artist, Ilya Kabakov, who has been creating in the USA for many years. Currently, in Poland, we do not often have the opportunity to see contemporary art from Russia. It is all the more pleasant that I invite you to the Atlas Sztuki to meet contemporary Russian conceptual art.