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Exhibition of Moscow art of 1960–80s opening in London

Exposition is dedicated to the three “golden” decades of the Moscow school of modern art that was revived in the post-Stalin period

LONDON, November 21 (Itar-Tass) — The exhibition “Breaking the Ice: Moscow Art 1960–80” is opening to the general public in the British capital on Wednesday. It presents works by Russian artists such as Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Kosolapov, Grigory Bruskin, Leonid Sokov, Erik Bulatov, Oscar Rabin and Oleg Tselkov.

The Saatchi Gallery in London that has become one of the world’s largest exhibition centres of contemporary art, which annually attracts more than 1.5 million people, has presented to the public over 200 exhibits of 22 non-conformism artists who lived and worked in Moscow in the 1960–80s of the last century. The exhibition, organised by Tsukanov Family Foundation, is dedicated to the three “golden” decades of the Moscow school of modern art that was revived in the post-Stalin period.

According to the event’s press release, the exhibition curator and founder of the Department of Contemporary Art of the State Tretyakov Gallery Andrei Yerofeev has identified the two main directions in the development of Russian art of that period. The first group includes people who identified themselves with the art process in the West and, above all, with abstract art, pop art and conceptual art. The second – the artists the work of which was the most influenced by the authoritarian regime and its ideological culture – that is, representatives of retro-modernist art, metaphysical art and social art.

“The classification of the main artistic movements presented at the exhibition introduces the Moscow school of contemporary art of the 1960–80s in the wider international context,” the organisers say. “This gives the key to the modern Western viewers to the understanding of the works that were created at a time when creative freedom was regarded as dissidence.” The organisers, however, did not aim to show all the participants in the creative non-conformist life in Moscow in the period from Nikita Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev.

Tsukanov Family Foundation is a charity established in London that implements a wide-ranging program of support for art, music and education in Russia and the UK. It has one of the world’s largest private collections of Russian post-war art. The project’s sponsors are, in particular, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom, Russia’s financial company Otkritie and Eurasia Drilling Company (EDC).

The exhibition will run until February 24, 2013.