An Undying Flow of Ideas: Ephemera from Tryokhprudny Lane Gallery

The selection focuses on the Tryokhprudny Lane Gallery, one of the first independent exhibition spaces to open in post‑Soviet Moscow. Every Thursday, from September 1991 to May 1993, it held exhibitions and performances by artists who in many cases went on to become key figures in Russian contemporary art. Tryokhprudny Lane Gallery stood apart from the galleries founded in the same era, such as Aidan, Regina, and 1.0. As art historian and witness of those events Andrei Kovalev pointed out, it had no official name, no bank account, no buyers, and no clients. What it had instead was an “undying flow of productive or just fun ideas,” which every Thursday brought the art community through its doors.

In just under two years of its existence, the gallery hosted 87 events in its space and eight more elsewhere. For every event artists produced a leaflet that, along with the title of the event and the address, featured a text about the projects. The leaflet was designed differently each time, featuring artists’ drawings and interesting fonts or stylized to look like a postcard or an ad with tear‑off phone numbers. “We called them invitations or booklets,” recalls Alexander Sigutin, who was an active participants and organizer of events at the gallery. “We handed them out before the event at other exhibition previews. They worked as both press releases and explanatory art historical texts for the exhibition. One of the leaflets always hung by the entrance, and 20 or 30 more lay folded on the old Viennese stool nearby.”

This selection features leaflets from Tryokhprudny Lane Gallery, which are now documents of the epoch. Today, they are part of Garage Archive Collection and accessible to the public through the RAAN project.

A display of ephemera from Tryokhprudny Lane Gallery can be seen in open storage at Garage.