Portraits of Hothouse Combine Workers, no. 1

Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina are one of the key artist couples in Russian art of the past forty years. They began working together in 1990. Their first collaboration was the project Closed Fish Exhibition, which developed and expanded over the twenty years that followed and became a seminal work of Moscow Conceptualism. By the time it was completed in 2015, it included 110 objects, around half of which are now in the collection of the Suermondt‑Ludwig‑Museum in Aachen, Germany. At Garage there are 24 objects, the largest part of the Closed Fish Exhibition in Russia.

The first showing of the Closed Fish Exhibition took place in 1990 at MANI (Moscow Archive of New Art) Museum in the country house of artist and Collective Actions member Nikolai Panitkov. The project was built around a brochure published in 245 copies for the 1935 exhibition that followed an official trip by Moscow artists to the Volga‑Caspian Gosrybtrest [State Fish Enterprise] in Astrakhan to learn about the Soviet fishing industry.

According to art historian Ekaterina Degot, the main art form in Moscow Сonceptualism is «the word, turned into an object.» The Closed Fish Exhibition is a brilliant illustration of her thesis: Makarevich and Elagina have reconstructed the 1930s exhibition based on the titles of works in its catalogue (which had no illustrations), literally turning them into objects‑enigmatic riddles assembled largely from found materials.