Nikita Alekseev

Nikita Alekseev is from a generation of artists whose names traditionally mark the Moscow conceptual school of the 1970s and 1980s, although his creative path is much broader than this phenomenon and also includes APTART (the legendary gallery under this name was arranged by Alekseev in his own apartment in the early 1980s) and the "new wave", which rehabilitated figurative painting.

Despite the fact that Nikita Alekseev was one of the central figures on which the Russian art scene has been held for more than thirty years, the symbolic role of the "main cast player" was paradoxically combined with extreme escapism and unwillingness to perform star rituals in public: to pose for the press, to give autographs. This was manifested in the fact that at the moments of the greatest commercial success (and the decline in quality, we note with sadness), associated with the "boom" of Russian art at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, or the beginning of the new millennium, Alekseev either went to live abroad for many years, or even announced the termination of work. So that when the dust and silt have settled and the light has returned, they will once again find themselves at the very heart of the artistic process.

Nikita Alekseev is known for his paintings and performances, as well as works in the literary genre. The latter is a completely independent and separate component in his work: almost all of his projects were accompanied by the author's commentary, sometimes in the form of explications to the exhibition, and sometimes as part of the work itself. The recognizable poetics of the artist is precisely this fusion of image and literary description, which refers to the phenomenon of literary diaries, for example, Alexander Pushkin, or travel notes, for example, Carl Linnaeus. A single graphic element that flows freely "from words to deeds", that is, from the letter to the image, contributes to the creation of an atmosphere that shines in the mood and is open to free spectator interpretations.

Eugenia Kikodze, art historian