Exhibition of Alexander Kiryakhno "Reliquary" Automatic translate

The Alisa Gallery, together with the Arka Gallery in Vladivostok, is opening in the large hall of the Cube Cultural Center. Moscow a personal exhibition of one of the most mysterious artists of Primorye - Alexander Kiryakhno, the creator of the eclectic, bodily and erotic aesthetics of Vladivostok. The exhibition will feature objects from different media and periods of work, starting from the 1990s: painting, graphics, collage, assemblage, as well as fabrics.

Alexander Kiryakhno from the first days of his career "did not fit" into the Soviet system of art and never tried to meet its criteria. The artist continues to keep apart in the post-Soviet period: everyone in Vladivostok knows him, but the exhibitions can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Curator and critic Andrey Erofeev explains this detachment by positioning. If in Vladivostok, according to the simplified capital scenario, the conservatives clashed with the followers of the avant-garde, then Andrei, calling such a confrontation provincial, notes that Kiryakhno left this struggle. “He is an alien, not fitting into the “Russian standard”, an artist. And therefore not provincial. His utterance is not late compared to the style of the metropolis. […].”

The image of Primorye created by Kiryakhno is devoid of regional and social portraiture, it contains neither the urban landscape, nor descriptions of coastal life and modernist architecture, nor prisoners of the Gulag, and no references to the Soviet. Instead, Kiryakhno creates his own world, filled with iconic relics that he has retrieved from home altars, “prayer rooms for Buddhists, animists, Orthodox, schismatics, and whips. But also in the secluded corners of bedrooms, in children’s "secrets", in ladies’ dressing tables and bedside tables", carried away not by the content of cults, but by the "aesthetics of an intimate reliquary", the shadows cast in the port city by adherents of different religions and cultures.

Analyzing Kiryakhno’s works, the critic compares them with Timur Novikov’s "curtains" and Konstantin Zvezdochetov’s "rags", turned to kitsch boudoir items, Daniel Spoerri’s assemblages, "new realists", as well as the American pop art version of Rauschenberg, the pathos of such a comparison making the viewer wonder how, despite the lack of institutional and curatorial support and the lack of professional dialogue, the artist manages to create his own microcosm and develop an artistic language in which he can speak with the whole world and time from his lonely island.

*Here and below are quotes from the catalog for the exhibition “The Land of Rebels. Contemporary art of Vladivostok. 1960–2010s”, Moscow: Mayer Publishing House, 2016, p. 105-107.

Kiryakhno Alexander Ivanovich was born in 1950 in the village of Novobureisky, Amur Region. Graduated from the Vladivostok Art College (1978–1982). Lives and works in Vladivostok. Participated in exhibitions at the Busan Museum of Modern Art (Korea), the Zarya Center for Contemporary Art (Vladivostok, 2015), the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Moscow, 2017), as well as in the Netherlands and the USA. The works are in the collections of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Artetage Museum (Vladivostok), as well as private collections in Russia and abroad.