George Kiesewalter archive

An active participant of the Moscow underground art scene in the 1970s and 1980s, George Kiesewalter was a member of Collective Actions and the Avant‑Garde Club and also took part in exhibitions at APTART Gallery. He documented the art scene he was part of and created a photo archive that has captured the activities of Collective Actions, the phenomenon of apartment exhibitions, and the life of his fellow artists. The archive contains over 500 digital photographs that offer a rare insight into the small unofficial artistic community of the time. The archive also features a “family album” of the scene, made by Kiesewalter: it contains photographs of exhibitions, events, and artist meetings with comments and notes. The album includes the exhibitions APTART Behind the Fence, Fight for Art (Art against Commerce), and Odessa Version; the Festival of Musical Dilettantes; and the evening Collective Actions Are 10. Materials from the collection can be found in the book Insider, published by Garage in 2015.

About George Kiesewalter

George Kiesewalter (b. 1955, Moscow) graduated from the Moscow State V. I. Lenin Pedagogical Institute in 1977. He was one of the co‑founders and members of Collective Actions group (1976–1989) and exhibited his works at APTART Gallery in Moscow (1982–1984). From 1981 to 1985, he was involved in compiling the Moscow Archive of New Art (MANI). Kiesewalter made paintings, drawings, objects, assemblages, and installations, created and took part in performances, and edited the books Those Strange Seventies or Loss of Innocence (Moscow: NLO, 2010) and Tipping the Eighties in the Unofficial Art of the USSR (Moscow: NLO, 2014).