Leiderman, Yuri.

[CONCEPTUALISM BETWEEN ODESA AND MOSCOW] Untitled (Rodina) [Motherland]. Original art object.

Hand-made book, Odesa, 1985–1987. Side-stapled booklet measuring 13 × 21 cm, with four leaves of hand-written text and drawing in felt-tip pen to rectos only. Item #55581

Born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1963, the artist and writer Yuri Leiderman is one of the key figures of both Odessa and Moscow Conceptualism — movements that challenged state ideology through conceptual play. An integral part of the conceptualist circles in both cities, Leiderman participated in unofficial apartment exhibitions in Odessa and Moscow starting in 1982. Typical of the Soviet Conceptualist movement, literature and art are closely intertwined in Leiderman’s work. Starting with samizdat poetry collections in the 1980s, in the post-Soviet period, Leiderman published several books of essays, prose, and poetry. In 2005, he was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize, the oldest independent literary prize in the Russian language. His artworks have appeared in over 40 solo exhibitions, and close to 200 group exhibitions including the Venice Biennale in 1993 and in 2003, and are held in major public collections, including the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, The Jewish Museum (Berlin). The artist’s archive is held by Yale University. In Spring 2023, his work was featured in the exhibition of 100 years of Ukrainian art “Kaleidoscope of Histories” at the Albertinum Museum, Dresden. Leiderman currently lives in Berlin.

Leiderman’s first samizdat volume of poems was published with fellow Odessa poet Igor Chatskin in 1982. In the same year he produced his first art object or “tetradka” (notebook) titled “Vspomnim o nebe” (Remember the sky). A series of hand-made books Knizhechki, knizhki, tetradki (Booklets, books, notebooks) followed throughout the 1980’s, with a selection of these offered in this collection. In 1987 Leiderman co-founded the performance art group “Inspektsiia Medgermenevtika” (Inspection “Medical Hermeneutics”) with Sergei Anufriev and Pavel Peppershtein (member 1987–1990). In a seminal 1990 essay on their work Boris Groys wrote: “first and foremost, the group’s activity calls into question a basic distinction integral to the modern artistic process: the distinction between the production of art and its interpretation” (See: Boris Groys, “Medical Hermeneutics, or Curing Health” in History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism, p. 160).

In Moscow, Leiderman was mentored by the conceptualist artist Andrei Monastyrsky, a founding member of the legendary performance art group Kollektivnye deistviia (Collective Actions). Leiderman attended many of the group’s actions and wrote interpretative and critical texts, later included in the samizdat volumes of Collective Actions. Writing about Liderman’s books, which he called “literary objects” because they “come at a specific intersection of art and literature” Andrei Monastyrsky remarked that „Leiderman’s series of school exercise books and small books in the first half of the 1980s was a significant genre event in conceptualism, comparable to Kabakov’s 1970s albums”. Monastyrsky also notes their extreme semantic charge. “The author achieved this mainly by using a stenciled typeface and a large quantity of remaining plain sheets from the exercise books”. The stenciled lettering used by Leiderman was typical for Soviet technical and administrative signage, common at institutions such as schools, hospitals, warehouses, on technical equipment etc. reminding the viewer of the ubiquity of Soviet power in the everyday. The blank sheets, on the one hand “highlighted the technique of expositional events, their grandiosity, and their magnitude”, and on the other “they are time spaces free of ideology […] For example, in The erudite malevolent wife fell on a black chest exercise book, seven out of fourteen pages have something on them, and the other seven are blank” (See: Andrei Monastyrsky, “Literary objects and other works by Yuri Leiderman” in Yuri Leiderman: Ensemblement, pp. 24–26).

In 2008 Leiderman permanently settled in Germany, co-founding the “Kapiton” group (2008–2010) with artists Vadim Zakharov and Andrei Monastyrsky. German curator Walter Seidl noted Leiderman’s shift toward questions of national belonging in this period. “Often drawing inspiration from themes of national identity, his artistic work seeks to transform such issues into abstractions, thereby testing their resistant qualities while foregrounding their unexplainable character.” In recent years Leiderman’s work has re-focused on his native Ukraine. In 2015 he took part in the exhibition “Enfant Terrible. Odessa Conceptualism” at the National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv. His film “Birmingham Ornament” was shown as part of the Kyiv Biennale in the same year. In 2017 he contributed a performance to the Odessa Biennale. Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan has called Leiderman an “artist for artists” while also acknowledging his paradoxical national feeling, and a desire to be an "artist for the nation" or “with” the nation (See “Zhivopis’ i svoevolie” (Painting and willfulness)). In Spring 2023, his work was featured in the exhibition of 100 years of Ukrainian art “Kaleidoscope of Histories” at the Albertinum Museum, Dresden. Leiderman currently lives in Berlin.

Price: €3,500.00

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