“Thaw” exhibition has opened at the Marble Palace of the State Russian Museum

This feast of Russian contemporary art celebrates the fifteen year anniversary of the prominent Moscow gallery run by collector Marat Guelman, and stands testament to its beneficial collaboration with the Contemporary Art Department of the Russian Museum.

“We have the feeling that we have made history,” Alexander Borovsky, head of the Contemporary Art department of the Russian Museum, emphatically said at the opening of the show.

A series of exhibitions during the last decade organized by the ambitious art collector from Moscow and the brilliant art theorist from St. Petersburg culminated with Guelman’s endowment to the museum in 2001, the first of such size and quality in Russia since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Now, the owner of the most representative collection of Russian contemporary art is occupying rooms in the Russian Museum.

The exhibition is divided by form. While the second floor displays works influenced by Guelman’s endowment to the museum, including such internationally recognized gems as AES+F’s “Islamic Project,” the third floor is packed with cutting-edge stuff from the collector’s current collection.

However, its precisely formulated title, “Thaw,” gives it keen historical perspective. The title emerged thanks to Dmitry Gutov’s bewitching work of the same-name, which features a video of a man (the artist himself) trying to walk along a slushy rural road in April, next to an illuminated reproduction of Fyodor Vasilyev’s “Thaw” (1871), a painting known to every Russian.

According to Guelman, we are now witnessing light morning frost after the thaw of the 1990s. This landmark-show embodies much nostalgia for that turbulent decade as well as giving insight into the self-satisfied, glamorous and cynical first years of the 21st century.

“Thaw” runs through Feb. 21 at the Marble Palace of the Russian Museum.