Sorting through layers of bygone styles, Yan Ginzburg reconstructs an event that never happened. Before us is a poetic evening of the young Eduard Limonov. Among the guests are people close to him in various ways, from mentors in literary craft (Evgeny Kropivnitsky) to close friends (Vagrich Bakhchanyan), wives (Anna Rubinstein, Elena Shchapova), and sexual rivals (Viktor Shchapov). Drawing on Limonov's main profession after moving from Kharkiv to Moscow, Ginzburg recreates the trousers sewn by the young poet in a different material, reminiscent of Indian saris and American geometric abstraction of the 1970s. Ahead of Limonov lie New York, Paris, Serbia, Yeltsin's Moscow, and events in which he played a consistent and unseemly role.
Ginzburg's installation, however, invites us into the pure potentiality of the era of stagnation and offers the pleasure of a game of quotes from artists of the period—both anonymous Soviet monument craftsmen and "serious" sculptors: the bodies of the participants in the poetic evening are composed of torsos referencing Igor Makarevich and limbs modeled on the heroic anatomy of Ernst Neizvestny.
The curator's text is available at the link: https://readymag.com/u2471488410/4491992/
Author: Valentin Dyakonov
The project team:
Curator: Valentin Dyakonov
Creative team:
Alla Boreysha
Ekaterina Borsuk
Maria Galas
Nikita Zhuravlev
Ekaterina Kurkova
Mark Otradinsky-Markov
Coordinator: Galina Leontyeva
Gallery team: Maria Gavrilchik, Ioann Pletnev,
Sara Shanina, Oksana Engelke, Ksenia Brook
Poster design: Faro Design
The exhibition is organized with the support of collectors:
Andrey Malakhov
Ksenia Chilingarova
Viktor Novichkov
Special thanks to the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and personally to the museum's director Anton Belov for providing materials from the Eduard Limonov archive.
