Mamyshev-Monroe V., Katsuba V.

Vladislav Mamyshev Monroe (1969-2013), the genius of transformation, was one of the most significant modern Russian artists.


Valery Katsuba (born in 1965) is a photographer whose works are present in the collections of the Russian Museum, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Modern Art Collection of the Government of the Autonomous Region of Madrid, the National Modern Art Collection of France.


As a creative partnership, they created a number of outstanding projects, one of which is “Every passion is blind and mad”, first shown at the XL Gallery in 2001.
In summer of 2015, this project was shown at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art as a part of Monroe’s large retrospective exhibition “Archive-M” and was included in the catalog of this exhibition.
It is a part of the collections of the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / The Moscow House of Photography.
In 2016, three works from this project were chosen for the collection of the Georges Pompidou National Center of Art and Culture in Paris. It consists of 10 photos on which Monroe’s character – the “mad clown”, as he called him – demonstrates the ten passions inherent to humans using deliberately overdone expressivity in the tradition of the silent cinema actors.
For the exhibition booklet in 2001, Vladik Monroe wrote: “Having happily accepted the invitation of Valery Katsuba to express my own emotions, I discovered and captured the mindless manifestations of passion, which sooner or later leave a thinking person. A faceless mask of the oligophrenic clown is, of course, not my true face, more like an evolution from Pierrot through Petrushka to a certain Monroe which the obliging public often uses for me…” V.K.M.M. – Vlad Korolevitch Mamyshev Monroe, as he called himself them.