Bananas series. From the project APTART Beyond the Fence

Nikita Alexeev was a representative of the second wave of Moscow Conceptualism. In 1982 he opened the gallery APTART in his small apartment on Vavilova Street in Moscow. During the two years of the gallery’s existence there were 14 exhibitions which included work by key artists of the 1980s Moscow underground: Toadstool Group, TOTART (Natalya Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov), Victor Skersis, Vadim Zakharov, George Kiesewalter, and others.

In spring 1983, as a result of increasing pressure on Nikita Alexeev and other artists, the gallery temporarily stopped work, although in that period two projects took place outside the city, including the one‑day exhibition APTART Behind the Fence, which took place in September at the dacha of artists Sergei and Vladimir Mironenko’s parents.

For this exhibition Nikita Alexeev created the series Bananas. Some of the sheets of paper were attached to bushes and others lay on the grass around them. The text‑centeredness, seriality, and irony typical of Moscow Conceptualism was supplemented by a lack of seriousness of visual content that was a feature of work by the younger generation of artists. Alexeev used an easy technique (felt‑tip pens), a simplified style of drawing, and bright colors. As a result, universal and contextually monumental symbols (the pyramid‑ziggurat, sun, and moon) take on the characteristics of a child’s drawing and common phrases become absurd expressions. This attempt to escape simplicity with words and images creates a semantic gap, the search for which was key to art for Nikita Alexeev.