Exhibition Elena’s collection Automatic translate

Collecting is an art.

We certainly recognize that creativity is the creation of values, the formation of a new world around the creator. If you think about what collecting is, it is creativity in its true meaning: this is the birth of a new essence, an author’s composition from many works; and this new composition expresses the vision and inner world of the collector.

The collection is a sincere self-portrait of a changing person who is interested, eager for new experiences and new knowledge, a person who is growing and young - how young all the artists are, no matter how old they are. Creating a collection, its author reproduces the model of a world filled with beauty that exists in the depths of his consciousness. He collects a mosaic of his own ideal collection, where each work is a precious element. It happens that the collector adds up his “picture of the world”, finds the final element and stops, feeling that the collection is complete and his statement is filled. But more often - the process of collecting is continuous and endless - as long as the soul of the collector is alive, he refines, improves, cleans and complements his collection.

We present to your attention the new Russian private collection of photographs Elena’s collection. 38 works, including works by Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz, Steve McCary, Herbert Ritz, and many other iconic figures of world photography of the 20th century.

In this collection are the “first names” of modern photography, the works of which have incorporated the deep traditions of world visual culture; each of them is the title page of an entire chapter in the history of photography, where the works of the leading masters of our time are in dialogue with many photographers from the past of different countries, different cultures.

The new collection of photographs in Russia unwittingly turns out to be part of the history of the great domestic collections of contemporary art. Schukin and Morozov collected contemporary European painting, Tretyakov and Ostroukhov - contemporary Russian artists; Talochkin, Khardzhiev - artists with whom they communicated and were friendly. Sometimes they say that the reality of their time is difficult to express in a word, for writers it is a challenge and hardly feasible work, but modernity can be felt and conveyed symbolically in poetry, music, painting, photography and in collecting. In the new collection of photographs presented to your attention, modernity is electrified, pulsating, striking the nerve endings with a paradoxical combination of beauty and unpredictability of discoveries. The fact that in the new collection of photographs are entirely the names of world foreign photography is a great success for the contemporary Russian art environment. There were no private collections of world photography in Russia, just as there was no ambition to create a collection of contemporary photographic art. When museum-level things that are recognized and have already entered the history of their art form are brought into the country, when such works become part of a single collection, there is a potential for understanding the artistic scale of modern photography, and new works, including by domestic artists, entering this collection, will acquire the most important - international - context for their perception.

We are sure that this is the first show of the collection, the new arrivals of which will delight viewers in the future.