The Kunstmuseum Bern is organizing an exhibition that gives fascinating insights into Arina Kowner’s extensive collection of Russian contemporary art. The collection comprises 200 works by 46 artists from the period dating from 1970 to 2008. The museum will be showing pictures by famous Russian nonconformist artists as well as works that were executed after 1989.
On the one hand, the exhibition focuses on famous Russian non-conformists who refused to adopt the social realist manner propagated by the Party and who worked until 1989 largely underground. Among them we find artists such as Erik Bulatov and Vladimir Nemukhin. The works of these two artists could already be viewed in the Kunstmuseum Bern — as early as 1988 in the exhibition I Live — I See and also in 2005 in Avantegarde Underground. Ilya Kabakov’s installations were also shown in Bern in 2000 in a one-man show.
Additionally in the coming exhibition, we find male and female artists represented who were largely active after 1989. Bella Matveeva is among them, a renowned representative of Leningrad neoacademism who has returned to figurative painting, and Vladislav Mamyshev ‘Monroe’, who mixes kitsch and pop art ironically, alienating both political as well as orthodox cultic images.
Arina Kowner attaches great importance to representing single artists in her collection by both older and more recent works, and, if possible, with whole groups of works. The collector, of Russian decent herself, is or was personally acquainted with most of the artists. As Kowner puts it herself, “mostly a personal encounter is involved in the purchase of a work of art.” Correspondingly she describes her collection as a “huge documentation of memories that impacted my life.”
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