Irina Korina is famous for her installations in which cheap materials are used to produce a surrealistic combination, taking on the qualities of jungle flora without losing the texture of the gray everyday. Her installation The Tail Wags the Comet (2017), produced for Garage, activated not only visitors' eyesight but also their sense of smell, with the help of aromas specially created based on the textures used in the installation. For several years another, completely different type of work has been part of her practice: postimpressionist sketches and portraits created by the confident hand of a true connoisseur of the École de Paris. These striking works are imbued with the sense of the fairy tale forest and of relaxing at the dacha, far from the daily grind. But they are inspired by the catastrophic events of 2020, when, in an attempt to escape the COVID-19 virus, the artist self-isolated in the countryside.

Public collections

State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), Moscow Museum of Modern Art, M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, and others.

Anastasia Potemkina, who took part in the exhibition The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030−2100 (2019) at Garage, lives and works by the maxim "There are no weeds, just inattentive people." For many years she has researched the everyday plant life of the megalopolis, first as part of Urban Fauna Lab and then independently. In the neon work Taraxacum (the scientific name for the dandelion), Potemkina underlines the relative nature of the categories that humans use to describe nature. And the Latin word has a particular plasticity, although it is far from the natural beauty of the simple dandelion.

Public collections (selected)

State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow)

Taus Makhacheva, who has participated in a number of exhibitions at Garage, including the 1st Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art (2017), often works with the processes and rituals around food. The press mold Caspian Sea weighs more than thirty kilograms. It is customized to produce a signed, unlimited edition of silicone shapes, which can be used in turn to bake millions of Caspian Seas.* In other words, it can either be owned as a single piece of art or used to produce large numbers of artworks in the form of silicone molds and bake millions of cakes using them. True to her efforts in thinning the line between art and real life, Makhacheva does not let us get away easily. Art is burned, chewed, and baked until it is molecular. Or, to be more accurate, until it becomes your molecular mold.

Public collections (selected)

State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow), Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern (London), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), LACMA (Los Angeles), M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, and others.

* The guaranteed quantity of silicone molds from one form is 10,000. The guaranteed quantity of bakes using one mold is 1,800.

Production supported by narrative projects, London

Evgeny Antufiev, who participated in the 1st Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art (2017), works with a mass of traditional materials, from wood and bronze to smalt and gold. He is interested in magical primitivism connected with the attraction of power, and the precious materials it uses to tempt and control not only our bodies but our souls. In this work Antufiev employs the mosaic of Greek and Roman antiquity but sees it through the prism of the Soviet monumental school. At first glance, the work seems to have come from a 1970s kindergarten, and it is only the frightening malachite eyes of the fairy tale birds that hint to us at a scene from the world beyond or from Bazhov’s tales.

Public collections

Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Multimedia Art Museum Moscow, Tate Modern (London), M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, and others.

Maurizio Cattelan is one of the best-known contemporary artists. For more than thirty years he has delighted viewers with objects and sculptures full of black humor. The sculpture L.O.V.E. is a hand with all of the fingers but the middle one cut off. In September 2010, a monumental version of this work was placed opposite the stock exchange in Milan’s Piazza Affari, the central business district of the richest city in Italy. This rude gesture suggests political satire: the artist appears to give the finger to the financial system, which was responsible for the global economic crisis of 2008. Yet Cattelan, as enigmatic as ever, says that it is about the imagination. Perhaps he means that for the sake of creative freedom it makes sense to distance ourselves from financial schemes and the emotions associated with them.

Public collections

Pinault Collection (Venice/Paris), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam), MOMA (New York), Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Astrup Fearnley Museet (Oslo), Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art (Turin), Solomon R. Guggenheim (New York), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), and others.

It’s unlikely that any other living photographer spends more time and effort on a single shot than Thomas Demand. Each work is the tip of an iceberg, the underwater part of which comprises the painstaking creation of paper models. No one other than the staff of his studio is aware of this process. The secrets of production accord with Demand’s interest in closed spaces and places endowed with historical meanings that may not immediately be obvious. The work from the series Refuge, created especially for the artist’s solo exhibition at Garage, is of this type. Demand used the story of the American IT specialist Edward Snowden, who revealed to the world the scale of surveillance of citizens' private lives by the US secret service. In summer 2013, Snowden fled the country, firstly to Hong Kong and then to Russia. While the question of his status was being decided at the highest level, Snowden lived in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. The interior of his room was recreated by Demand for this series.

Public collections

Tate Modern (London), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), MOMA (New York), Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), Fondazione Prada (Milan), and others.

Exhibitions

Thomas Demand. Mirror Without Memory, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2021

American artist Jenny Holzer works with words. Her text ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE is frequently quoted as an ideal commentary on political injustice. She places borrowed or invented phrases in street advertising, scrolling LED displays, and posters. The juxtaposition of pedestrian setting and often poetic language creates a break in reality, the phrases sticking in the minds of viewers, as if they had dreamt them. Here a marble footstool is engraved with HANDS ON YOUR BREAST CAN KEEP YOUR HEART BEATING. While this text, from Holzer’s Survival series (1983−1985), can have romantic interpretations, it can just as easily be read as an excerpt from a first-aid guide to lifesaving interventions in near-death situations.

Public collections (selected)

Tate Modern (London), MOMA (New York), MACBA Museum of Contemporary Art (Barcelona), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and others.

Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers, London

*This work cannot be resold for 10 years from the date of sale.

Rashid Johnson’s Anxious Drawings are incredibly expressive works produced from scrawled gestures in oil stick on cotton paper. Inheriting the neo-primitive manner of Jean Michel Basquiat and the art brut of Jean Dubuffet, he covers the surface with a rhythmic grid of faces, with only hints of their features remaining. These loosely figurative forms can be seen as expressions of anxiety that are at once deeply personal to the artist and also universally relatable. Johnson continues to make these loosely figurative drawings and paintings. During the global lockdown in 2020, he shifted from black oil to a custom red colored paint, which he felt embodied the urgency and horror of the time. In a recent series of paintings and drawings Johnson has worked with a deep blue pigment. These works he entitled Bruise paintings and drawings, speaking to the aftermath of trauma and the beginning of the healing process.

Public collections (selected)

Metropolitan Museum (New York), MOMA (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Astrup Fearnley Museet (Oslo), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, D.C.), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), and others.

The important Moscow conceptualist Viktor Pivovarov, whose exhibition The Snail’s Trail was shown at Garage in 2016, differed from his allies in the Soviet underground in terms of the internal integrity of his oeuvre. His commissions for children’s book illustrations and his "adult" works are in a mutually enriching dialogue, exchanging characters and subjects. In Pivovarov’s work, the metaphysical emptiness and futurology of the Russian avant-garde are transformed into the back streets of fairy tale states, where cartoon characters (or maybe caricatures) roam. In Quartet No. 4, a painting that hints at a consistent subject, one can see elements of the projectionism of Solomon Nikritin and Kliment Redko and characters from the cartoon almanac Jolly Carousel. Nevertheless, the main mood is one of romantic solitude and the concentration of the alchemist, revealed by Pivovarov back in the 1970s in the famous series Projects for a Lonely Man.

Public collections

State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow), State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern (London), National Gallery Prague, Centre Pompidou (Paris), and others.

Swiss Artist Urs Fischer’s exhibition Small Axe (2016) at Garage included not only objects and sculptures but also an enormous open-air studio called YES, where anyone could create something from clay. For Fischer, who loves jazz improvisation, this collective effort, which brought together children and adults in a united creative impulse, was an important part of his project in Moscow. The artist retains the connection to childish spontaneity in many of his works, and Easy is no exception.

Public collections

Pinault Collection (Venice/Paris), MOMA (New York), Migros Museum of Contemporary Art (Zurich), MOCA (Los Angeles), Kunstmuseum Basel, and others.

Works by Jeff Koons have been shown in Moscow on several occasions, including at the exhibition Un Certain Etat du Monde? A Certain State of the World? at Garage in 2009. Koons primarily works with the iconography of contemporary mass culture and such categories as banality and con — sumerism, considering his task to be "to make things that people enjoy." His works are held in the collections of MoMA (New York), Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Tate Modern (London), Fondazione Prada (Mi — lan), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), Pinault Collection (Venice/Paris), and others. The purchaser of this lot can visit jeff Koons' studio in New York, where the artist cre — ates his works (including paintings and sculptures), and find out about the creative practice and life of one the most successful artists of our time.

Please note that travel to New York and accommodation there are not included in the cost of the lot.

Музей Метрополитен, основанный в 1870 году, является, наравне с Эрмитажем и Лувром, одним из крупнейших «универ- сальных» музеев мира. 17 отделов музея аккумулируют величайшие художествен- ные достижения человечества, охватыва- ющие все культуры и времена, от искус- ства Древнего Ближнего Востока (8000 лет до н. э.) до последних художествен- ных открытий. В то же время обширная программа временных выставок дает воз- можность посетителям Метрополитен по- знакомиться с культурой и искусством во всем их многообразии — как, например, выставки Института костюма, которые в последние годы приковывают к себе внимание самой широкой аудитории.

Владелец лота сможет посетить любой раздел постоянной экспозиции или вре- менные выставки на свой выбор, когда музей будет закрыт, вместе с их куратора- ми или хранителями.

Обращаем ваше внимание, что трансфер и размещение в Нью-Йорке не включены в стоимость лота.