Nikita Alexeev

Omission Points

Nikita Alexeev (b.1953) received training at the Moscow Institute of Graphic Arts. He was exposed to Western contemporary art from an early age and became interested in contemporary poetry and new currents in visual arts and music.

In the beginning of 1970s, Nikita Alexeev was known in Moscow as a poet and participated in underground readings. His early painting and graphics he himself defines as ‘surrealistic abstraction’.

In 1970s he linked up with the artists of the group ‘Sretensky Bulvar’, especially Ilya Kabakov, who made a great impression on him.

In 1979, together with Andrey Monastyrsky, Nikolai Panitkov and Lev Rubinstein, Alexeev created the group ‘Collective Actions’. This group made about 120 actions aiming to mine the mechanisms of creating the senses and the ways to overcome the limits of conventional meanings. He also conducted his individual actions, more lyrical and existential and also more improvisational.

In 1979 Nikita Alexeev, in cooperation with the other participants of ‘Collective Actions’, organized the Moscow Archive of New Art (the Russian acronym of the name is МАНИ) — an exceptional collection of the works by the artists of Moscow conceptualism.

In 1982 Alexeev opened a gallery in his personal apartment — the famed APTART, which became the venue of choice for the second generation of unofficial artists’ wild performances and absurdist expositions. The result of the gallery’s activity for Nikita Alexeev, as well as for the Moscow art situation, was a dramatic transformation of the style. The artists started to use another artistic language — visually more aggressive and textured. During this period, Alexeev often experimented with the surface of the paintings, using different materials (fabric, objects).

In 1985–87 Alexeev played ‘simulation rock’ with the ‘Central Russian Elevation’ group.

Today Alexeev works on partly autobiographical subjects, creating something of a visual diary.

I have long been interested in Georges Seurat. In my view, this artist stands entirely apart from what his colleagues and his contemporaries were doing. He’s an extreme formalist, what’s more he’s a conceptualist long before conceptualism. Believing, or pretending that he believes in the physical theories of the day on the nature of color and light (today they’re entirely antiquated), like a fanatical monk, he tapped out these multi-colored dots, creating his own universe. It’s enough to look at his masterpieces ‘Grande Jatte’ and ‘Cirque’ to understand that this is even further away from the reality that we are in than the creations of the neo-plasticist Piet Mondrian and the suprematist Kazimir Malevich. A heaven, or perhaps a hell where, in the pulsing haze, who found themselves caught there are trapped for eternity.
But I am neither a formalist nor a conceptualist. And in any event, Seurat would not have approved of me. I’m a woodpecker. Tapping dots is the battering of the snipe and the procurement of worms. Each dot is the fluttering of a feather, the sheen of the sunshine in it, the counting of paces, inhalations and exhalations; a second or a year of life, a centimeter or a light year’s movement in space. It’s a waste of time, an attempt to stop movement from A to B, or, on the contrary, to speed it up.