OLEXANDR ROITBURD /Amalgam
23.11.2007 — 18.01.2008

The 23th of November, Friday, 19.00, the gallery "Collection" presents the project of one of the patriarchs of the Ukrainian contemporary art Olexandr Roitburd.

The main intrigue of the new series "Amalgam" is holding in the image of mirrors that are present in works. The personages of the pictures, for example, half-naked woman with dollar bills, young men that drink from the bottle, a nun with a mirror or a hand that is reaching for the Chinese box - they all seem to be in the world behind the looking glass. Grotesque "anti-"objects get sense only reflecting in the distorted mirrors that hopelessly deform normal objects. The author thoughtfully added mirrors to them, mirrors that seem to fall apart the moment you look directly on them.

Stylistics of some works of the series "Amalgam" is similar to the Russian left salon of the XX century, that the artist it interested in since his teenage years. Especially it is noticeable in the work with a yellow chrysanthemum. Nowadays the interest towards this style seems to be waking up again. Its humanity, esthetic fineness and virtuosic elegance are explored again.

Daryna Zholdak, the director of the gallery "Collection": "We are proud of our co-operation with Olexandr Roitburd, because it's the living history; and every collection of contemporary art isn't full without his works. "Amalgam" is interesting because more of psychological nuances, personal feelings in his works - in some of them you can recognize the interiors of the Kyiv apartment or the Odessa studio of the artist. But it is some sort of summing up of the previous years, quintessence. The author creates new art from the bygones".

Roitburd produces pictures that are autobiographical in the first sense and in the sense of the history of his creative work and intellectual interests. Being one of the brightest artists on the breaking point of the centuries he is known to be one of the representatives of the so-called "Ukrainian wave" or Ukrainian trance-avant-garde of the end of the 80s - beginning of the 90s - art stream that was the sensation in the art of the late USSR. In the 90s Roitburd created a line of curator projects, the most well-known of which is "Academy of Coldness" (1998) in the Odessa Art Museum. And the same year he created his first and the most famous video "Psychedelic invasion of battleship "Potemkin" into the tautological hallucinosis of Sergey Eisenstein", that belongs to the collection of Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. It is this work that was presented in the international exposition of the 49th Biennale in Venice. Roitburd was the curator of the gallery of Marat Guelman in Kyiv and the Head of the supervisory committee of the Contemporary Arts Center in Odessa. The works of Olexandr Roitburd are presented in the State Tretyakow Gallery and the collection of PinchukArtCentre.

A catalogue was published to the exhibition. It contains the autobiographical material and the works of previous series. The prices of a work are $ 7.000 - 25.000. The project "Amalgam" will last till the 18th of January 2008, with a pause for the project of photo-artist Lesya Malska from the 14th to the 24th of December. The gallery "Collection" is opened every day, except Monday, from 10.00 to 19.00.