Alekseev Nikita Feliksovich

The artist, writer, critic and one of the most important and controversial figures on the contemporary art scene Nikita Alekseev somehow manages to cut an outsider even in a most personally advantageous situation. He received training at the Moscow Institute of Graphic Arts, got exposed to Western contemporary art from an early age, developed an interest in the interrelationship of text and image, and joined the circle of Moscow conceptualists. He took part in meditative performances of the Collective Actions group and was one of the organizers of the Moscow Archive of New Art (the Russian acronym of the name is МАНИ). Having said goodbye to the esoteric exploits of Collective Actions, Alekseev opened a gallery in his personal apartment – the famed “APTART”. It became the venue of choice for the second generation of unofficial artists’ absurdist expositions and wild performances. In 1985-87 годах Alekseev played “simulation rock” with the "Central Russian Upland" group. A participant of many exhibitions of Russian unofficial art outside of Russia, he lived in France for a few years. Disenchanted about contemporary art, he came back to Moscow and became the editor for Culture section of the weekly “Inostranetz” (“The foreigner”). He resumed artistic pursuits with his “Death Drawings” (the project lasted several years) – a series of deliberately simple drawings full of drama and self-irony. Discontent with contemporary art’s departure from the purely visual and its proclivity for anecdotal and provocative caused him to turned away from today’s artistic trends. He started working on simple and clear, partly autobiographical subjects. Alexeev draws and writes something of a visual diary, hiding lyricism and tender feeling behind the façade of absurdity and dark sarcasm. The author of «Memory Rows», an autobiography, he recently started putting on the web his new book, “Aachen-Yakhroma”.