Garage Museum of Contemporary Art Presents an Exhibition of Documents

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art: Summer Exhibitions Chéri Chérin, Road to exile, 2004. Oil on canvas. RMCA Collection, Tervuren. Raymond Pettibon: The Cloud of Misreading June 7, 2017 - August 13, 2017   Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Till the Map…), 2008. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.   Following its tradition of introducing internationally renowned artists to a local audience, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art will present the first solo exhibition of Raymond Pettibon in Russia. A major part of the Garage summer exhibition season, the show—curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari from the New Museum in New York—brings together more than three hundred works, including ephemera and materials from the personal archive of a figure who has been key to the American art scene since the 1990s. Pettibon first received attention for his work when it was used in fliers, zines, and record covers in the burgeoning Los Angeles punk scene of the 1980s. His work became identified with a brash and iconoclastic visual style that would influence and speak to generations of disaffected youth. In spite of this impact, Pettibon’s link to the punk scene has obscured the scope of his thematic and stylistic vision and the important place he occupies in the history of contemporary art: He stands alongside a generation of Los Angeles artists who have tackled the dissolution of American idealism head-on, using fragments of its own visual culture. David Adjaye: Form, Heft, Material June 7, 2017 - August 13, 2017   David Adjaye, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy Adjaye Associates.   Form, Heft, Material, the mid-career survey of world-renowned architect Sir David Adjaye’s work to date, launches this June at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Art Institute of Chicago, offers insight into the global architect’s unique approach, highlighting the ways he weaves local geographies and cultural legacies into his celebrated designs. Showcasing over twenty examples of his built works, including the Moscow School of Management (Skolkovo), the exhibition also provides rare access to Adjaye’s research strategies in the early stage of design development. David Adjaye: Form, Heft, Material is the first exhibition of a major architect at Garage and inaugurates a new chapter in the Institution’s longstanding interest in developing discourse around contemporary architecture and its role in society today. Adjaye’s firm Adjaye Associates has developed an exhibition design specifically for the Museum, bringing his characteristic sense of light and pacing to Garage’s historical modernist building. Congo Art Works: Popular Painting May 20, 2017 - August 13, 2017   Chéri Chérin, Wax print seller, 2002. Oil on canvas. RMCA Collection, Tervuren.   Garage Museum of Contemporary Art presents Congo Art Works: Popular Painting, a survey of Congolese art over the last fifty years, developed by the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), Tervuren in collaboration with Centre for Fine Arts Brussels (BOZAR). Six years after showing Carsten Holler and Jean Pigozzi’s acclaimed overview of art from two important and wildly different cultures—JapanCongo—Garage revisits the Democratic Republic of Congo, a former Belgian colony that has become a hotbed of contemporary artistic production. This time, the angle is quite different: paintings by prominent Congolese artists are presented not as exotic objects, but as depictions of everyday reality which aim to make sense of the country’s present and its history. Congo Art Works: Popular Painting draws from the collection of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) and tells the story of art in the Mobutu Sese Seko era and beyond. The exhibition is curated by Bambi Ceuppens of RMCA and Congolese artist Sammy Baloji, who places his compatriots’ works within a dense net of colonial memories, personal documents, and hard facts. Congo Art Works: Popular Painting is, in many ways, a continuation of Baloji’s investigation of the history of his home country that has developed through research, installations, and curatorial projects since 2006. Kholin and Sapgir: Manuscripts May 20, 2017 - August 13, 2017   Left: Cover of The Greedy Little Frog by Igor Kholin, with illustrations by Suzanna Byalkovskaya. Published by Detsky mir, Moscow, 1962. Right: Cover of Voinrid by Igor Kholin, with illustrations by Viktor Pivovarov. No 433/537. Published by S. Nitochkin, 1993. Both images courtesy of Garage Library, Moscow.   Garage Museum of Contemporary Art presents an exhibition of documents relating to the poetry of Igor Kholin (1920–1999) and Genrikh Sapgir (1928–1999), offering fresh insight into the work of two pioneers of Soviet nonconformist literature. Their names are often encountered together: in literary analysis, in publications on Russian contemporary art, and on children’s book shelves. Kholin and Sapgir met in 1952 and became close allies. Both were members of the first postwar unofficial community of artists and poets, known as the Lianozovo group, and pupils of its leader, artist Evgeny Kropivnitsky. They worked alongside some of the key names in Russian postwar art, including Oskar Rabin, Lydia Masterkova, and Vladimir Nemukhin. Bohemians of the 1960s and 1970s, their avant-garde poetry was unpublishable until the advent of perestroika. They were heroes of the literary underground, pioneers of samizdat, and featured in the first issue of the samizdat poetry journal Sintaksis, published by Alexander Ginsburg in 1959. Both combined an innovative style of writing with a strong commitment to truth, and a genuine interest in the life of ordinary people. They fused expressionism and realism, with an acute sense of the tragedy of the everyday and the poetics of the absurd. Their funny and moving “barracks poetry” quickly became part of Soviet folklore, often quoted by people who had never read the original texts. Kholin and Sapgir led a double life typical of nonconformist writers and artists of the post-Stalin era: showing their work only to a small audience of friends and admirers, they took odd jobs to make a living. Kholin worked as a waiter at the Metropol Restaurant, while Sapgir was an engineer at the Sculpture Studio of the USSR Arts Fund. Both became famous as authors of children’s poetry, which was read by generations of Soviet kids. Sapgir also wrote scripts for a number of classic animated films.