Georgy Kiesewalter

Georgy Kiesewalter (Russian: Георгий Кизевальтер, b. 1955 in Moscow) is a Russian conceptual artist, photographer and essayist, working in different artistic areas from painting to graphic art, from installations to conceptual photography and digital art.

Biography

Georgy's ancestors were German, which given his Russian background has sometimes been anglicized as Kizevalter or Kisevalter. He graduated from Moscow Lenin Pedagogical Institute in 1977. In 1976–89, he was one of the original members of the Russian conceptual performance group Collective Actions. In the mid-1970s – 1980s, he was very close to the circle of artists like Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov, Erik Bulatov, Ivan Chuikov et al., and actively participated in such unofficial artistic formations of the time as the AptArt movement, the Moscow Archive of New Art (MANI), and the Avantgardists' Club in Moscow. In 1996, he decided to move to Canada, but returned to Russia at the end of 2006.

In the early 1990s, Kiesewalter arranged a number of broadcasts on arts and culture issues on Radio Liberty in Munich, Germany. He is also the author or co-author of several books and many articles on contemporary art and photography published in Russia. In 1997, he received an Open Society Institute grant to help publish his first book about Moscow's unofficial artists, The Communal Body of Moscow.

His works can be found in many private and institutional collections, including the Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and the Duke University Museum of Art (USA), Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and Ekaterina Cultural Foundation (all in Moscow), the Kolodzei Art Foundation (New Jersey), and many others.

Major exhibitions

1976 – Unofficial apartment shows, Moscow 1977 – La nuova arte Sovietica: Una prospettiva non ufficiale. La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy 1981 – Russian New Wave. Contemporary Russian Art Center of America, New York, USA 1983 – Vassya Museum. AptArt Gallery, Moscow (solo exhibition) 1984 – AptArt in Tribeca. Contemporary Russian Art Center of America, New York, USA 1985 – AptArt. Moscow Vanguard in the ‘80s. Washington Project for the Arts, Washington 1988 – Art Chicago 1988 – Art Basel 1988 – I Live – I See: Moscow Artists of the 1980s. Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland 1989 – The Green Show. Exit Art, New York, USA; Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina; Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, Canada 1990 – Sommer Atelier (Junge Kunst in Europa). Hannover, Germany 1990 – G. Kizevalter: And Where is the National School? F. Duran Gallery, Madrid, Spain (solo exhibition) 1990 – Towards the Object. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 1991–1993 Prospects of Conceptualism. The University of Hawaii Art Gallery, Honolulu; The Clocktower Gallery P.S.1, New York; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, USA 1991 – Contemporary Soviet Art. Setagaia Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan 1991 – Contemporary Soviet Artists. Auditorio de Galicia, Santiago de Compostela, Spain 1991 – MANI Museum: 40 Moskauer Künstler. Frankfurter Karmeliterkloster, Frankfurt am Main, Germany 1991 – Kabakov, Kizevalter, Makarevich. Parallel 39 Gallery, Valencia, Spain 1993 – Monuments: Transformation for the Future. World Financial Center, New York, USA; Central House of Artist, Moscow; Kunstihoone, Tallinn 1995 – Kunst im Verborgenen. Nonkonformisten Ruβland 1957–1995. Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen am Rhein; documenta-Halle, Kassel; Staatliches Lindenau-Museum, Altenburg, Germany; Manege Central Exhibition Hall, Moscow 1995–1996 Flug, Entfernung, Verschwinden. Konzeptuelle Moskauer Kunst. Galerie Hlavniho Mesta Prahy, Prague; Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; Stadtgalerie im Sophienhof, Kiel, Germany 1996 – Fluxus: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. History without Border. Central House of Artists, Moscow 1996 – Russian Conceptual Art of the 1980s: the Collection of the Duke University Museum of Art. Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (USA) 1998 – Russian Landscape. Geneva, Switzerland 2005 – Collaborators. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (within the framework of the First Moscow Biennale) 2006 – Artists Against the State: Perestroika Revisited. Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York 2007 – Sots Art. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; La Maison Rouge, Paris 2007, 2008, 2009 – Sotheby's Art Auction exhibitions 2008 – Total Enlightenment. Conceptual Art in Moscow 1960–1990. Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Fundación Juan March, Madrid 2008 – Performing the Archive: Collective Actions in the 1970s-80s. Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA 2009 – Not Toys?! State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (within the framework of the Third Moscow Biennale) 2010 – Field of Action. Moscow Conceptual School and its context. Ekaterina Art Foundation, Moscow 2011 – New Hagiography Project. Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (solo exhibition) 2013 – Expansion of the Object. Moscow Museum of Modern Art 2013 – Dreams For Those Who Are Awake. Moscow Museum of Modern Art 2013 – Department of Labour and Employment. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow 2014-15 – Rauschenberg: Collecting & Connecting. Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC, USA 2015 – Insider. Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (solo exhibition). 2022 – Thinking Pictures. Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia. 2023 – Artist-Collector. The Moscow Museum of Modern Art.

Books and essays

The Collective Actions group (Monastyrski A., Panitkov N., Alekseev N., Makarevich I., Elagina E., Kiesewalter G., Romashko S., Hensgen S.). Poezdki za gorod [Trips to the Countryside] (In Russian). Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1998. Kiesewalter, Georgy. Kommunal'noe telo Moskvy [The Communal Body of Moscow] (In Russian). Moscow: Restart/Polidiz, 1999. Kiesewalter, Georgy. Monolog Anatolija Zvereva [Monologue of Anatoly Zverev] In Anatolij Zverev v vospominanijah sovremennikov [Anatoly Zverev in the Memoirs of his Contemporaries] (In Russian). Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, 2006. Kiesewalter, Georgy, ed. Jeti strannye semidesjatye, ili Poterja nevinnosti [Those Strange Seventies or Loss of Innocence] (In Russian). Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2010. Kiesewalter, Georgy, ed. Perelomnye vos'midesjatye v neoficial'nom iskusstve SSSR [The Watershed Eighties in Unofficial Soviet Art] (In Russian). Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2014. Kiesewalter, Georgy. Samizdat kak sredstvo vyzhivanija dlja neoficial'nyh hudozhnikov [Samizdat as a means of survival for unofficial Soviet artists] (In Russian). In Strukova, E., Belenkin, B., eds. Actasamizdatica. Anthology : Issue 2. Moscow: Russian State Historial Library; International Memorial, 2015. , Kiesewalter, Georgy. Vremja nadezhd, vremja illjuzij. Problemy istorii sovetskogo neoficial'nogo iskusstva. 1950–1960 gody: Stat'i i materialy [Time of Hopes, Time of Illusions. On the Problems of the History of Soviet Unofficial Art. 1950-1960: Articles and Materials] (In Russian). Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2018. Kiesewalter, Georgy. My Memories of Tõnis Vint; A Visit to Tõnis Vint. In Kunst.ee : Eesti kunsti ja visuaalkultuuri kvartaliajakiri = Quarterly of art and visual culture in Estonia #1, 2022 Kiesewalter, Georgy. Reportazhi iz-pod-valov. Al'ternativnaja istorija neoficial'noj kul'tury v 1970-h i 1980-h godah v SSSR glazami inostrannyh zhurnalistov, dopolnennaja interv'ju s ee gerojami [Reports from under-the-walls. An alternative history of unofficial culture in the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s through the eyes of foreign journalists, supplemented by interviews with its heroes] (In Russian). Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2022.