Margarita Masterkova-Tupitsyna. Lydia Masterkova: The Right to Experiment

  • Year2022
  • LanguageRussian
  • Edition2000
  • Pages288
  • BindingPaperback
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This first monograph on the work of Lydia Masterkova (1927–2008), one of the few female artists in the unofficial art milieu of the late 1960s and early 1970s, was written by her niece, art historian Margarita Masterkova-Tupitsyna.

The book covers the Soviet and foreign periods of Lydia's practice, beginning with her decision to take up the “uncommon and dangerous profession” of an alternative artist in 1943. It includes rare photographs and letters from Lydia Masterkova to Margarita Masterkova-Tupitsyna and Viktor Agamov-Tupitsyn, written during the period of emigration and before the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are published here for the first time.

Look inside and read an excerpt.

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Author

Margarita Masterkova-Tupitsyna is an independent curator, art historian, and critic. She received her PhD from the City University of New York. From 1981 to 1983, she was the curator of the Center for Contemporary Russian Art in America (New York), where she organized the first exhibitions of Moscow conceptualists and Sots artists. Select exhibitions include Sots Art (New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1986), The Green Show (Exit Art, New York, 1990), Malevich and Film (Belem Cultural Center, Lisbon, 2002), Against Kandinsky (Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2006), Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism (Tate Modern, London, 2009), and Russian Dada (Museo Nacional de Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2018). In 2015, she curated the Russian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.

Margarita is the author of exhibition catalogues, anthologies, and monographs, including Margins of Soviet Art (1989), The Soviet Photograph, 1924–1937 (1996), Anti-shows: APTART 1982–84 (2017), and Moscow Vanguard Art: 1922–1992 (2017). Her writings have been published in Art in America, Artforum, Art Journal, and Flash Art. In 2000, she received the Berlin Prize Fellow from the American Academy in Berlin. In 2001, she was awarded an honorary grant from the Kandinsky Society at the Pompidou Center (Paris) and in 2011, a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She lives and works in New York.

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