Exhibitions in GARAGE: January 2018

GARAGE

Installation view of Bidding for Glasnost: Sotheby's 1988 Auction in Moscow, Garage Museum, January 2018
Installation view of Bidding for Glasnost: Sotheby's 1988 Auction in Moscow, Garage Museum, January 2018, Photo: Yuri Palmin, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018

Dear Friends,

In the midst of a very snowy Moscow winter, Bidding for Glasnost: Sotheby's 1988 Auction in Moscow, has opened at Garage, exploring the ramifications of introducing the art market to a communist society. Through archival materials and recent interviews with participating artists and organizers of the sale, the exhibition tells the story of one of the most controversial art events of the late-Soviet era. It also features seven original lots from the 1988 sale, including Clown, Circus Scene (1935) by Alexander Rodchenko, Fabric Design (1924) by Varvara Stepanova, Fundamental Lexicon (1986) by Grisha Brushkin—which was the highest-selling contemporary work—and Ilya Kabakov’s All About Him (1971), bought by Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman and presented to the USSR Ministry of Culture as the founding artwork for a future museum of contemporary art. The auction is also featured in the book Exhibit Russia: The New International Decade 1986–1996, published by Garage in 2016, which is available internationally from www.artbook.com and www.amazon.com.

Meanwhile, this week is the last chance to experience Takashi Murakami’s exhibition Under the Radiation Falls, which closes on February 4. One of the most visited shows in the ten-year history of the Museum, it presents the artist’s work in the broader context of Japanese culture and pays homage to Murakami’s long-term project to creatively unite and question Eastern and Western traditions.

Don’t miss the chance to be one of the first to purchase the latest book in Garage Archive series—Critical Mass: Moscow Art Magazine 1993-2017—and get your limited edition Murakami clothing and souvenirs from Garage Bookshop online before it’s too late! Items will only be available until February 4.

Scroll down if you’d like to see more of what Garage is up to at the beginning of 2018.

All the best,

Kate Fowle

Kate Fowle
Garage Chief Curator

 

GARAGE EXHIBITIONS

Installation view of Bidding for Glasnost: Sotheby's 1988 Auction in Moscow, Garage Museum, January 2018
Installation view of Bidding for Glasnost: Sotheby's 1988 Auction in Moscow, Garage Museum, January 2018, Photo: Yuri Palmin, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018

BIDDING FOR GLASNOST: SOTHEBY'S 1988 AUCTION IN MOSCOW
January 23–February 28, 2018

On July 7, 1988 Sotheby’s held an auction titled Russian Avant-Garde and Soviet Contemporary Art at Sovincentr in Moscow. It was the first international art auction ever to take place in the Soviet Union. Initiated by auctioneer, Simon de Pury, more than one hundred lots of early twentieth-century avant-garde and Soviet contemporary works were made available. Conducted in pounds sterling, the auction was intended for international collectors who were flown in especially for the event, watched over by incredulous local artists and intelligentsia, who were not permitted to have foreign currency under the legislation of the time. Telling the story via the artists and organizers of the event (who have been interviewed over the past year), the exhibition reveals the contradictory perspectives on the auction that still remain today.

The exhibition is accompanied by a public program that began on January 29 with the discussion Sotheby’s Auction in Moscow. 30 Years Later, featuring organizers, participants, and witnesses of the events of 1988, who will discuss how and why it became possible to run a Sotheby’s auction in the Soviet Union. The series of public events will continue on February 9 with a lecture delivered by Jeffrey Boloten, Course Leader of the Art & Business semester at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London. Boloten will outline the mechanisms of auction houses and the ways auction sales may influence the art market.

For more information on the exhibition and the accompanying public program, please visit our website.

 

Photo: Fedor Kandinsky, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018
Photo: Fedor Kandinsky, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018

POST-RELEASE. ART EXPERIMENT: LABORATORIES OF EARTHLY SURVIVAL
December 19, 2017 – January 8, 2018

For the eighth annual edition of Art Experiment, Garage transformed the gallery space into experimental laboratories where more than two thousand visitors worked directly with thought-provoking artists, scientists, biohackers, and engineers. This year’s Art Experiment aimed to provide participants with skills in agricultural-, bio-, genetic-, and robotic-engineering, prompted by the urgent issues of ecology and of our future earthly survival being endangered by society’s overly fast technological progress.

The project was very different for the Museum: each night after closing, staff had to check whether the chicks had been fed, the plants had enough light and water, leaving the institution with the feeling that, similarly to real laboratories, something was growing and evolving in silence and needed to be protected and kept safe. Visitors were encouraged to look at the experience of an art museum in a different way, where biological processes defined the length of the workshops, and expectations for immediate results gave way to slower, more focused intellectual and manual labor in which posing questions and coming to unexpected problem-solving were prioritized.

 

GARAGE PUBLISHING

Photo: Anton Donikov, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018
Photo: Anton Donikov, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018

CRITICAL MASS: MOSCOW ART MAGAZINE 1993–2017

Critical Mass: Moscow Art Magazine 1993–2017 is the third in a new series of books that presents research and materials developed through Garage Archive Collection. It is published to mark the hundredth issue of Moscow Art Magazine and presents a selection of texts which cover the development of Russian art since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Arranged thematically, they range from the hopeful manifestos of the early 1990s to the angry, politically-engaged art of the 2010s. Curator and writer, Viktor Misiano, who was the founder of the publication has written new introductions to the themes covered in the book, setting the original texts within the social and political context of their time. Artist Georgy Litichevsky has produced seven comic strips, one for each chapter. A critical chronology marks important events in the cultural life of Russia connected to criticism and art theory, such as the first translations of key international texts.

Critical Mass is available internationally from www.artbook.com.

 

GARAGE ARCHIVE AND LIBRARY

Photo: Maria Lubkova, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2016
Photo: Maria Lubkova, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2016

NEW SERIES OF READING GROUPS IN 2018

Garage Library has launched a new season of reading groups, meetings, and discussions on key questions of contemporary art and culture. The series includes:

Writing and Language Politics: Feminine, Feminist, Female
February 7–March 14
Three groups will start in February 2018. Moderated by Oxana Kita and Lolita Agamalova, meetings will focus on the phenomenon of “female literary language,” its origins, and critique from the feminist position.

Texts and Theory in Twentieth-Century Architecture
February 8–March 22
Participants in this group, which is moderated by Kirill Stepanov, will explore the architectural history of the twentieth century through texts written by its leading theorists and practitioners.

Design and Art: Between Utilitarian Object and Cultural Sign
February 13–March 27
This group, moderated by Margarita Morozova, will focus on texts about the principles of the interaction of art and design.

Further groups will be announced shortly, with a focus on the theory of contemporary photography, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the history of Soviet modernist art of the 1920s and 1930s. They will take place in Garage Library from March to May 2018.

The reading groups project was launched in 2015. Meetings take place from February through December.

For more information on reading groups, please visit our website.

 

GARAGE BOOKSHOP

Photo: Erik Panov, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017
Photo: Erik Panov, © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017

LAST CHANCE TO PURCHASE THE LIMITED EDITION GARAGE X MURAKAMI COLLECTION

To celebrate Takashi Murakami’s exhibition Under the Radiation Falls, Garage and the artist created a limited edition of specially-designed clothing and accessories that unites Murakami’s iconic worldview with the design aesthetic of Garage. Designed in Moscow and produced in Russia items are available from Garage Bookshop or online until the exhibition closes on February 4.

 

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