The Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art

From the very start, the Pecci Centre had an interest in Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet art.  Its first exhibition on Russia was Artisti russi contemporanei (Contemporary Russian Artists) in 1990 just two years after the centre opened and shortly after perestroika, followed in 2007 by Progressive Nostalgia. Arte contemporanea  dell’ex URSS (Progressive Nostalgia. Contemporary art in the former USSR). Some of the works from these two exhibitions have since entered the museum’s permanent collections. A third exhibition, The Missing Planet. Visioni e revisioni dei tempi sovietici (The Missing Planet. Visions and re-visions of ‘Soviet Times’) was held in 2020. It was conceived as a utopian journey into the past through the memories of artistic and social events belonging to different generations of dissidents from both the Soviet and post Soviet eras including during the ‘stagnation’. Together with works from the museum’s permanent collections which had featured in the two preceding exhibitions there were works by Giuliano Gori which had previously been exhibited at Mosca: terza Roma (Moscow: a third Rome – 1989) and cinematic and archive material organised by Can Altay of iconographical images used to promote Soviet Russia.
The catalogues of the three exhibitions included original contributions by the artists themselves, critical essays and documents related to the art of the period.
For the Contemporary Russian Artists exhibition in 1990, the curators Amnon Barzel and Claudia Jolles presented the leading figures of non-official art from the 1960s onwards, emphasising their influence on and relationship with contemporary Soviet society now that more open contact with the West was possible. The artists exhibited included Erik Bulatov, Igor’ and Svetlana Kopystianskii, Il’ia Kabakov, the Medical Hermeneutics group, Perzi, Sergei Volkov, Vadim Zakharov and Konstantin Zvezdochetov.
The 2007 exhibition, Progressive Nostalgia. Contemporary art in the former USSR, curated by Viktor Misiano, looked at artistic developments in the ex USSR and in the countries which, in the 1990s, had remained under the cultural aegis of Soviet Russia, seeking to explore connections with and departures from non-official art of the Soviet period. The exhibition looked to the future in adopting a variety of contemporary means of expression, including graphics, photography, video and performance art. The event offered a reflection on the relationship of contemporary art with the canons of the past and explored art’s interaction with power and society, at a time when concepts about the autonomy of art were again becoming relevant.
Most of the approximately 40 artists and groups belonged to the generation of the 1960s and 1970s and included Vahram Agasian, Babu Badalov, Petr Bystrov , Pavel Braila, Elena and Viktor Vorobev, Ol’ga Chernysheva, Dmitrii Gutov, Ulan Diaparov, Koka Ramishvili, Konstantin Sulaberidze, the St Petersburg “Factory of Found Clothes” group (FFC, Natalia Pershina-Iakimanskaia and Ol’ga Egorov), the Ukranian R.E.P. group “Revoliutsionnoe Eksperimental’noe Prostranstvo”,  the Lithuanian group led by Nomada and Gedeminas Urbonas  and the “Chto Delat’” art collective.
The Missing Planet. Visions and re-visions of ‘Soviet Times’ exhibition in 2020 under the curatorship of Marco Scotini and Stefano Pezzato, built on the two preceding exhibitions to undertake a wide survey of art in the thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. (A. Tarkovskii, Solaris, 1972; D. Narkevičius, Revisiting Solaris, 2007), exploring the emerging spatial and temporal distance from Soviet reality. (S. Ujica, Out of the present 1995; A. Vidokle, Immortality for All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism 2014 – 2017). The exhibition adopted a format derived from those dominant during the Soviet period (with the use of archive material, graphic works, installations, video, film and photographs), to trace the development of artistic expression from the first attempts to create a utopia, to its collapse and finally to a post-Soviet re-envisioning, as society changed and forms of protest evolved. The works exhibited came from the Centre’s own collections as well as from public and private Italian collections of Russian art such as those of Gori, Beccaglia, Righi and Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.

The exhibition also presented images typical of Soviet iconography  such as those in the headquarters of the Associazione Italia-URSS (Italo-USSR Association) in Milan, curated by Vladislav Sapovalov, and collections of memorabilia, such as that belonging to Italo Rota in Rome. There were also works by Dmitrii Prigov, Elena and Viktor Vorobev, Anatolii Osmolovskii, the Radek Community and Pro-test groups, the Usbek artist, Viacheslav Akhunov, Vladimir Kupriianov, Boris Orlov, Leonid Tishkov, Andrei Filippov and Ol’ga Kiselёva.
Transcripts of interviews, critical essays, and statements by artists and collectors were included in the booklet that accompanied the exhibition (The Missing Planet. Visioni e revisioni dei tempi sovietici, Centro Pecci Nero Editions, Roma 2020).

Lucia Tonini
[31^st December 2022]

Bibliography

•  The Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato, https://centropecci.it/.
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• Artisti russi contemporanei, exhibition catalogue, Prato 10^th February – 14^th May 1990, ed. by A. Barzel V. Jolles, Museo d’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato 1989.
• La fine del mondo, exhibition catalogue, Prato 2016, Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Silvana ed., Prato 2016.
• Mosca: terza Roma, exhibition catalogue, Roma May-July 1989, ed. by V. Misiano, Edizioni Spazio uno, Roma, 1989.
• Progressive Nostalgia. Arte contemporanea dall’ex URSS, exhibition catalogue, Prato 27^th May – 26^th August 2007, ed. by V. Misiano, Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato 2007.
• The Missing Planet. Visioni e revisioni dei tempi sovietici, Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Nero Editions, Roma 2020.

Location: Prato

Dates: 1988 to date

The Luigi Pecci Centre in Prato