Main Collection

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art archive

An architect by education, Misha Le Jen turned to performance art in 1990, inspired, as he says, by the Foucault pendulum in St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg. He had the idea of making a painting using the movement of the Earth. To make it, he built a flying machine he called Leplane‑a suspension device that fixed the artist's body in the air, allowing him to assume a new position in relation to the painting surface. He later defined his performances as “consistent rejection of the superfluous in favor of pure action, a striking gesture.” 

 Le Jen interacts with nature and life as a combination of forces that are beyond human control, yet fascinating to study and live. He inherited his interest in the world around him and his approach to creativity as a practice that is integrated into life and natural for a human being from his grandmother, the well‑known Saratov artist Valentina Chelintsova. A positive and active view of the world‑which means the artist is full of hope and enthusiasm in their creative impulse‑seeks simplification rather than complexity, which brings Le Jen's work closer to the craft of inventors rather than to a fundamentally hermetic conceptualism that denounces reality. 

 To date he has created over sixty actions, some of which were documented in the eight volumes of Catalogues of Actions covering the period from 1993 to 2007.

 An architect by education, Misha Le Jen turned to performance art in 1990, inspired, as he says, by the Foucault pendulum in St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg. He had the idea of making a painting using the movement of the Earth. To make it, he built a flying machine he called Leplane‑a suspension device that fixed the artist's body in the air, allowing him to assume a new position in relation to the painting surface. He later defined his performances as “consistent rejection of the superfluous in favor of pure action, a striking gesture.” 

 Le Jen interacts with nature and life as a combination of forces that are beyond human control, yet fascinating to study and live. He inherited his interest in the world around him and his approach to creativity as a practice that is integrated into life and natural for a human being from his grandmother, the well‑known Saratov artist Valentina Chelintsova. A positive and active view of the world‑which means the artist is full of hope and enthusiasm in their creative impulse‑seeks simplification rather than complexity, which brings Le Jen's work closer to the craft of inventors rather than to a fundamentally hermetic conceptualism that denounces reality. 

 To date he has created over sixty actions, some of which were documented in the eight volumes of Catalogues of Actions covering the period from 1993 to 2007. 

Catalogues of Actions (1993–2007)

Gift of the artist

Acquired from Igor Makarevich

Private gift

Acquired from the artist

After graduating in graphic design from Camberwell (a college of University of the Arts London), Peter Belyi spent a long time working with xylography, creating “giant engravings on Brazilian plywood.” In 1999 he became a full member of the Royal Society of Painter‑Printmakers, which admits only two artists per year. After returning to Russia in the early 2000s Belyi’s creative practice changed radically. He rejected traditional media in favor of creating installations and objects. Using industrial materials, such as concrete, box profile roofing sheets, electric cable, steel rods or particle board, the artist deconstructs utopian projects of the past, revealing the disappointment and unjustified expectations associated with the functioning and subsequent winding down of the Soviet project. Belyi calls his creative method memorial modeling, where a futuristic concept like the “model” is examined in a critical yet nostalgic light. 

 In creating the installation Pinocchio’s Library, Belyi focused on the image of a1960s architect who is enthused by ambitious ideas of changing the world but is forced to design standard panel‑construction residential buildings. The upward‑focused wooden shelving units are reminiscent of a model of a future urban space that was not destined become reality. The roughly constructed boards are as if doomed to decay and gather dust within one of the numerous Soviet research institutes, eventually becoming a memorial to the last powerful utopian impulse of the twentieth century. Just as knowledge is inaccessible, restricted by rigid censorship and ideological frameworks, so the books in the library cannot be opened and read. The main character in the project, the wooden boy Pinocchio, is concealed within the material of the installation, metaphorically expressing the untapped potential of an entire generation of dreamers.

 After graduating in graphic design from Camberwell (a college of University of the Arts London), Peter Belyi spent a long time working with xylography, creating “giant engravings on Brazilian plywood.” In 1999 he became a full member of the Royal Society of Painter‑Printmakers, which admits only two artists per year. After returning to Russia in the early 2000s Belyi’s creative practice changed radically. He rejected traditional media in favor of creating installations and objects. Using industrial materials, such as concrete, box profile roofing sheets, electric cable, steel rods or particle board, the artist deconstructs utopian projects of the past, revealing the disappointment and unjustified expectations associated with the functioning and subsequent winding down of the Soviet project. Belyi calls his creative method memorial modeling, where a futuristic concept like the “model” is examined in a critical yet nostalgic light. 

 In creating the installation Pinocchio’s Library, Belyi focused on the image of a1960s architect who is enthused by ambitious ideas of changing the world but is forced to design standard panel‑construction residential buildings. The upward‑focused wooden shelving units are reminiscent of a model of a future urban space that was not destined become reality. The roughly constructed boards are as if doomed to decay and gather dust within one of the numerous Soviet research institutes, eventually becoming a memorial to the last powerful utopian impulse of the twentieth century. Just as knowledge is inaccessible, restricted by rigid censorship and ideological frameworks, so the books in the library cannot be opened and read. The main character in the project, the wooden boy Pinocchio, is concealed within the material of the installation, metaphorically expressing the untapped potential of an entire generation of dreamers. 

Pinocchio’s Library

Portraits of Hothouse Combine Workers, no. 4

Caravan

Ris-Unok

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.

 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. 

Radio Motor at Sea

Sketch 2

Portraits of Hothouse Combine Workers, no. 2

In his practice Alexander Povzner combines a love for traditional sculpture and conceptual art. His research projects often involve diametrically opposite media, materials, and techniques which are so different that they cannot always be identified as his work. He upends the canon with ease and switches between artistic styles, avoiding the use of a single language. This might involve surrealistic readymades, works in marble or bronze, abstract compositions or absurdist scenes made of painted plaster. Povzner does not limit his search in any way. Nevertheless, one of the characteristic features of his works is alogism, impossibility, the collision of the incompatible, the connecting of the unconnectable. His world is populated by werewolves, centaurs, chimeras, monster birds, goat women, two‑headed dogs, antique figures in flowerpots, people‑functions, and object‑paradoxes. 

 The sculpture Hare‑Warrior is from the series Animal‑Warriors. The huge, grotesque, mutant hare is made of plaster painted bright orange. In its paws it holds a Kalashnikov assault rifle and its uniform bears an emblem with a carrot planted in the ground. “Hares appeared in primary school during boring lessons,” Povzner recalls. “On the back pages of notebooks, in the margins of test papers and dictations. They inhabited my imaginary country. They spoke and wrote in a made‑up language. I drew political and geographical maps, flags, wise men and warriors, flora and fauna, and other details of the imaginary world. Everything was thought up, drawn, and named. Often the drawings were accompanied by small texts. This went on all through school and university. Every so often I return to them.”

 In his practice Alexander Povzner combines a love for traditional sculpture and conceptual art. His research projects often involve diametrically opposite media, materials, and techniques which are so different that they cannot always be identified as his work. He upends the canon with ease and switches between artistic styles, avoiding the use of a single language. This might involve surrealistic readymades, works in marble or bronze, abstract compositions or absurdist scenes made of painted plaster. Povzner does not limit his search in any way. Nevertheless, one of the characteristic features of his works is alogism, impossibility, the collision of the incompatible, the connecting of the unconnectable. His world is populated by werewolves, centaurs, chimeras, monster birds, goat women, two‑headed dogs, antique figures in flowerpots, people‑functions, and object‑paradoxes. 

 The sculpture Hare‑Warrior is from the series Animal‑Warriors. The huge, grotesque, mutant hare is made of plaster painted bright orange. In its paws it holds a Kalashnikov assault rifle and its uniform bears an emblem with a carrot planted in the ground. “Hares appeared in primary school during boring lessons,” Povzner recalls. “On the back pages of notebooks, in the margins of test papers and dictations. They inhabited my imaginary country. They spoke and wrote in a made‑up language. I drew political and geographical maps, flags, wise men and warriors, flora and fauna, and other details of the imaginary world. Everything was thought up, drawn, and named. Often the drawings were accompanied by small texts. This went on all through school and university. Every so often I return to them.” 

Warrior Hare

Cuts

Red Fish Cutting

Still Life with Fish

Étude. Oil

Portrait of a Helmsman

Sturgeons

Ris-Unok. Lead Pencil

Deck

Vera Miturich‑Khlebnikova has been making artist’s books since the 1990s. An heir to the Miturich and Khlebnikov dynasties, she graduated from Moscow Printing Institute and worked on illustration and book design. Experimenting with form the artist creates book‑objects or book‑installations in which the documentary is entwined with the imagined.

In the book A Woman Making Art Miturich‑Khlebnikova explores the theme of time and memory, alternating archive photographs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and newspaper announcements from the 1990s, touchingly combining the narratives of different eras. The announcements were taken from the Russian post‑perestroika publications Vse dlya vas, Iz ruk v ruki, and Argumenty i fakty, which published short messages free and without censorship. Everyday, crazy, heartrending, full of despair or, on the contrary, naive hope, these concentrated little stories are supplemented with carefully selected photographs of unknown people from a discarded archive that had belonged to distant relatives. The anonymous stories become a disturbing collective portrait of the time, and the combination of the verbal and the visual creates the effect of an unexpected dialogue.

Vera Miturich‑Khlebnikova has been making artist’s books since the 1990s. An heir to the Miturich and Khlebnikov dynasties, she graduated from Moscow Printing Institute and worked on illustration and book design. Experimenting with form the artist creates book‑objects or book‑installations in which the documentary is entwined with the imagined.

In the book A Woman Making Art Miturich‑Khlebnikova explores the theme of time and memory, alternating archive photographs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and newspaper announcements from the 1990s, touchingly combining the narratives of different eras. The announcements were taken from the Russian post‑perestroika publications Vse dlya vas, Iz ruk v ruki, and Argumenty i fakty, which published short messages free and without censorship. Everyday, crazy, heartrending, full of despair or, on the contrary, naive hope, these concentrated little stories are supplemented with carefully selected photographs of unknown people from a discarded archive that had belonged to distant relatives. The anonymous stories become a disturbing collective portrait of the time, and the combination of the verbal and the visual creates the effect of an unexpected dialogue.

A Woman Making Art

Unok

40 × 22.7 × 8 cm; 40 × 22 × 8 cm; 40 × 21.5 × 8 cm; 40.2 × 22.8 × 8 cm

Seiners

Sketch 1

Portraits of Hothouse Combine Workers, no. 3

An architect by education, Misha Le Jen turned to perform‑ance art in 1990, inspired, as he says, by the Foucault pendulum in St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg. He had the idea of making a painting using the movement of the Earth. To make it, he built a flying machine he called Leplane‑a suspension device that fixed the artist's body in the air, allowing him to assume a new position in relation to the painting surface. He later defined his performances as “consistent rejection of the superfluous in favor of pure action, a striking gesture.” 

Le Jen interacts with nature and life as a combination of forces that are beyond human control, yet fascinating to study and live. He inherited his interest in the world around him and his approach to creativity as a practice that is integrated into life and natural for a human being from his grandmother, the well‑known Saratov artist Valentina Chelintsova. A positive and active view of the world‑which means the artist is full of hope and enthusiasm in their cre¬ative impulse‑seeks simplification rather than complexity, which brings Le Jen's work closer to the craft of inventors than to a fundamentally hermetic conceptualism that manifests reality. 

 To date he has created over sixty actions, some of which were documented in the eight volumes of Catalogues of Actions covering the period from 1993 to 2007.

 An architect by education, Misha Le Jen turned to perform‑ance art in 1990, inspired, as he says, by the Foucault pendulum in St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg. He had the idea of making a painting using the movement of the Earth. To make it, he built a flying machine he called Leplane‑a suspension device that fixed the artist's body in the air, allowing him to assume a new position in relation to the painting surface. He later defined his performances as “consistent rejection of the superfluous in favor of pure action, a striking gesture.” 

Le Jen interacts with nature and life as a combination of forces that are beyond human control, yet fascinating to study and live. He inherited his interest in the world around him and his approach to creativity as a practice that is integrated into life and natural for a human being from his grandmother, the well‑known Saratov artist Valentina Chelintsova. A positive and active view of the world‑which means the artist is full of hope and enthusiasm in their cre¬ative impulse‑seeks simplification rather than complexity, which brings Le Jen's work closer to the craft of inventors than to a fundamentally hermetic conceptualism that manifests reality. 

 To date he has created over sixty actions, some of which were documented in the eight volumes of Catalogues of Actions covering the period from 1993 to 2007. 

Catalogues of actions

Fishing Season (version)

Portraits of Hothouse Combine Workers, no. 1

1. Открытый доступ

Мастер

Elena Elagina (1949–2022) was born in Moscow and studied in the Philology Faculty of Moscow Pedagogical Institute. 

 Igor Makarevich was born in 1943 in Trialeti (Georgian SSR). He studied in the Art Faculty of the All‑Union State Cinematography Institute (VGIK). 

 From the late 1970s they were involved with the group Collective Actions. The project Closed Fish Exhibition (1990) marked the beginning of their working together. Selected solo exhibitions: Within the Limits of the Beautiful, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (2005); In Situ , Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2009); Countdown , Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2020). They took part in the 53rd (main project, 2009) and 54th Venice Biennales (Russian Pavilion, as part of the exhibition Empty Zones. Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions, 2011). They are winners of the Innovation Prize in the nomination Contribution to the Development of Contemporary Art (2012) and the Moscow Prize in the nomination Visual Art and Architecture (2021).

Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina 

Misha Le Jen was born in Khvalynsk (Saratov Oblast). He graduated from the Architecture Faculty of Leningrad Engineering and Construction Institute. From 1987 to 1990 he was a member of the art group Zheltaya gora (Saratov) and from 2011 to 2024 was art director and curator of the museum and residencey Artkommunalka. Erofeev and Others. Selected solo exhibitions: Six Actions with a Ball, Pasinger Fabrik, Munich (1994), Horizon and Other Actions, Saratov Radishchev State Art Museum (1997).

Le Jen Misha

Alexander Povzner was born in Moscow. He graduated from the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (Moscow), Moscow Surikov State Art Institute, and the Institute of Contemporary Art (Moscow). He took part in the 1st Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2017) and the 8th Tashkent International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2018).

Povzner Alexander

Peter Belyi was born in Leningrad. From 1990 to 1992, he studied at Leningrad Mukhina Higher Industrial and Art College. In 2000, he completed his Master’s degree at Camberwell School of Art. In 2009, he founded the gallery Lyuda. He is a member of the St. Petersburg Union of Artists. He is a recipient of the Sergey Kuryokhin Prize in the nomination Best Work of Visual Art (2009) and the Innovation Prize in the nomination Curatorial Project (with Alexander Terebenin, 2015).

Belyi Peter

Vera Miturich‑Khlebnikova was born in Makhachkala. She graduated from the Faculty of Artistic and Technical Design for Print Production of Moscow Printing Institute (1977). She has participated in numerous group projects in Russia and abroad, including the exhibitions The Artist’s Book (Museum of Private Collections, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, 1999), Petr, Vera, Mai, Vera. Four Creative Portraits (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2001), Collage in Russia. 20th Century (State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, 2005), and The Book as Art: Twenty Years of Artists’ Books from the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C., 2006). She is a member of the Union of Artists of Russia.

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