Anatoly Osmolovsky - the story of life and work

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Anatoly Osmolovsky is a very popular and clearly controversial figure in contemporary Russian culture. It mixes a talented artist and an attentive curator, an opposition politician and an outrageous personality.

All his actions are characterized by humor and cynicism, which are on the verge of a foul. Some of his performances clearly violate the Criminal Code, but pursue good intentions. He was born in the USSR and grew up in turbulent perestroika times. What kind of person is Anatoly Osmolovsky? The biography and work of this person will be discussed further.

How it all began

Osmolovsky Anatoly Feliksovich was born in 1969 in Moscow. And he made his first attempts at writing precisely in the literary field during the turbulent time of perestroika. In 1987, he joined the little-known literary group "Vertep", changing his membership a year later to another group of a more critical orientation, with a name that corresponded to the spirit of that time - "Ministry of missile defense of the USSR." Unfortunately, little is known about his activities at that time.

E. T. I. Movement

Anatoly Osmolovsky began to show his talent as an artist in the early 90s, when he headed the odious E. T. I. (Expropriation of the territory of art). It was a kind of experiment by artists who wanted to express their attitude to certain events in unusual ways. For example, one of the first actions was a performance at the farewell match of Soviet football legend Fyodor Cherenkov. One of the founders of the movement as a fan for the first time in the history of the USSR ran onto the field and, shaking hands with Cherenkov, ran away. Of course, after that he was seized by the police. But this was the first ever such run by a fan on the field in the USSR.

Another unusual event was the Explosion of the New Wave festival, which showed 15 of the best films by French directors of the avant-garde new wave. At the end of the festival, at the screening of the film Zazi in the Metro, the organizers decided to involve the audience in a retrospective: on stage, the actors repeated fragments from the film, then threw cakes at each other and the audience, and at the end they threw a net on everyone. Anatoly Osmolovsky was the ideological inspirer of one of the most infamous actions, as a result of which the well-known obscene word of three letters was laid out with the bodies of the participants. The action was a kind of sarcastic caricature of the recently issued law on morality and was held on the eve of Lenin's birthday. Of course, a criminal case was opened against all the participants, the closure of which was facilitated by the cultural elite of that time. Art historians consider this action the beginning of the "actionism" movement not only in Moscow, but throughout Russia.

We remind you that Anatoly Osmolovsky, whose photo can be seen in the article, was one of the organizers of this action.

The group's last action was the so-called "Clearing": the participants wanted to clear the snow on the land allocated for the football field and play on it, but they were detained by the police. Anatoly Osmolovsky took an active part in the preparation of this action. E. T. I. broke up in 1992, when the program, according to the organizers, was exhausted.

Multifaceted personality

After that, Anatoly Osmolovsky worked for a short time as the editor of the controversial cultural magazine "Radek", which was published in just three issues and was revived in 2000 as a cultural society.

symbiosis of exhibition and performance activities. With this movement, Osmolovsky again tried to revise the foundations of postmodernist adherents, making exhibitions and installations that undermined the established concepts of new art. In 1995, the Berlin Senate and the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien cultural exhibition center for contemporary art awarded the artist a grant for outstanding success in promoting unusual arts to the masses.

In 2008, Osmolovsky's talent was appreciated. He was made the winner of the Kandinsky Prize as "Artist of the Year".

In subsequent years, Anatoly actively participated in cultural life, holding various exhibitions, publishing books, acting in films, organizing an election race and, of course, shocking the public with his behavior.

An internationally recognized artist

His talent as an artist is appreciated by the audienceand art critics, because his paintings are exhibited and kept both in museums in Russia, for example, in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and abroad (the Ludwig Forum Gallery in Germany, the Museums of Modern Art in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Antwerp (Belgium)).

During all these years he took part in many solo and group exhibitions, each of which was not just an exhibition of paintings, but a manifesto of postmodernism and its relation to the realities of the modern world. After all, Anatoly Osmolovsky is not only a contemporary artist, but also a multifaceted creator, whose brilliant ideas cannot always be realized just by putting them on canvas.

Osmolovsky - Rector?

One of Osmolovsky's latest unusual projects was the organization of the Baza Institute, in which he is the rector. The concept of the institute is different from the simple teaching of art in the usual sense of this kind of institution. This is a learning and research platform for people who are able to think and want to learn it. For those who are ready to put forward extraordinary solutions and destroy the foundations of contemporary art. For everyone who is extraordinary, gifted and brave.