Nailya Alexander Gallery is excited to announce our participation in the 24th edition of Paris Photo, the world’s leading art fair dedicated to photography, taking place from Thursday, November 11 to Sunday, November 14, 2021, at the Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris.
This year, we present a solo exhibition of the artist Alexey Titarenko (b. 1962, St. Petersburg), focusing on his groundbreaking work “Nomenklatura of Signs” (1986–1991), a series of photomontages and collages inspired by the Russian avant-garde that depicts the absurd and darkly comic reality of Soviet life; and his subsequent series “City of Shadows” (1991–1994), wherein Titarenko unleashed the expressive potential of long exposure in capturing the suffering and anxiety that ensued during the collapse of the USSR. Titarenko’s haunting images of ghostlike crowds have become iconic today. Our exhibition is especially timely as it coincides with the 30th anniversary, in 2021, of the fall of the Soviet Union, and also includes some of Titarenko’s more recent work, including photographs of New York. Titarenko crafts each print by hand in his darkroom, producing a rich, subtle range of tones that renders each print unique. Photographs from his New York series are especially notable for his application of partial bleaching and selective selenium and gold toning.
“Alexey Titarenko: City of Shadows,” retrospective exhibition was held in 2020 at the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow. Titarenko’s photographs can be found in such museum collections as the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Columbus Museum of Art; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Denver; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of the City of New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the George Eastman House, Rochester; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the European House of Photography, Paris; the Musée Réattu, Arles; the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; the Centre National de l'Audiovisuel, Dudelange, Luxemburg; Rosphoto Museum, St. Petersburg; the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow; and the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, among other museums.
Nailya Alexander Gallery can be found in booth C29. We will host a book signing for Titarenko’s monograph Nomenklatura of Signs (Damiani, 2020), on Saturday, November 13 at 3:00 PM. For those who are not able to visit the fair in person, we hope you will enjoy our exhibition online through Tuesday, November 30.
