Brian Droitcour

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  picks August 07, 2006

  Zanna Kadyrova

  For her first solo show in Moscow, the Ukrainian sculptor Zhanna Kadyrova has filled a black, mirrored display case with diamonds made of ceramic tile. But she isn't trying to be precious. Her fake gems look clumsy and heavy—most are at least a foot wide—and the lackluster color scheme of brick red, washed-out olive, and matte black prompted one Muscovite at the opening to exclaim, “What a poor selection of tile colors they must have in Kiev!” That remark unwittingly offered a sociopolitical reading of Kadyrova's work by indicating the gulf between Moscow and the rest of the former

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  picks June 01, 2006

  Valery Koshlyakov

  Using cardboard, his signature material, Valery Koshlyakov has built a ruin of all the achievements of Soviet industry and engineering, collapsing one-sixth of the earth's surface into 8,600 square feet of space in a former paper factory. His paintings (a Far East seascape with fishing boats, a portrait of a miner) and sculptures (an oil derrick, a tractor, a towering structure reminiscent of Tatlin's designs for the Monument to the Third International) are arranged within this maze of cardboard walls and columns. The obstacles and irregular paths make viewing the exhibition like picking one’s

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  picks May 30, 2006

  “Helene's Shoulders”

  In War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote that Countess Helene Bezukhova was “polished by the thousands of gazes that had slid across her body.” This idea of desire is translated here to two semiabstract series: Viktor Alimpiev’s pink and gray paintings and Anatoly Osmolovsky’s perforated metal rectangles.

  Osmolovsky’s objects recall Russian bus tickets, which are validated
  by having holes punched in them. The title of the series confirms this resemblance; the series “Tickets to Paradise (Dedicated to the Popular Protest Against the Monetization of Benefits),” 2005, refers to the mass demonstrations that