Vitaly Komar Figurative Diaspora

Gagosian Quartlery Feb 25, 2018

In 1990, Vitaly Komar, a key figure of the Sots Art movement, introduced Mark Tansey to a community of Chinese painters who had recently arrived in New York from Beijing. In return, Tansey organized an informal exhibition of their paintings in his New York studio, entitled Transformations (1994).

Twenty-three years later, Figurative Diaspora, co-curated by Tansey and Peter Drake, Dean of the New York Academy of Art, presents paintings by five Chinese artists, three of whom participated in Tansey’s Transformationsexhibition, alongside works from five Russian artists who had been creating “unofficial,” subversive, non-state sanctioned art decades earlier. In serendipitous coincidence, a scholarly publication Thank You for Your Love 1994, edited by Xin Wang, curator and art historian based in New York, with contributions from Cindy Xingyi Qi, MA student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, will be available in the summer of 2018 to closely examine the multifaceted implications of the Transformations gathering not only for the participating artists, but also for the art historical discourses in 1990s New York and that of contemporary Chinese Art

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