KONSTANTINOV Yury

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
The Collection of Contemporary Art of the State Museum-Reserve Tsaritsyno, Moscow
Collection of the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1990 together with A. Ponomarev. Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow
1991 Gallery "Today", Moscow
1992 "Aleksandr Konstantinov". Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
1993 Gallery "Moscow Collection", Moscow
1994 "Gerade und umgekehrte Perspektive des russischen Minimalismus. Ljubov Popova 1924-1994 Aleksander Konstantinov". Palais Lichtenstein, Feldkirch, Austria
"Minimalismus als Wille und als Spiel. Solo exhibition". Galerie Zolgasse 7, Dornbirn, Austria
1995 Galerie Salustowicz, Bielefeld, Germany
1995 "Kanzlei". Franz Kafka Center in Prague. Prague
Galerie Salustowicz, Bielefeld, Germany
1996 Exhibition of Forms. Kaliningrad State Art Gallery, Kaliningrad
Galerie Art 5 III. Berlin, Germany
"Gesprach aus zwei Raumen. Francisco Infante – Aleksander Konstantinov". Galerie Zollgasse 7, Dornbirn. Osterreich, Germany
Russian Cultural Center. Budapest, Hungary
1997 "High Printing". Gallery "Today", Moscow
"Stand at 49th Frankfurt Book Fair". Frankfurt am Main, Germany

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
1988 "Graphics of Moscow Artists: To the City and the World". Central House of Artists, Moscow
1990 "Avant-garde-90", international architectural and art exhibition, Manezh, Moscow
"ART MYTH 1". Central House of Artists, Moscow
1991 "ART MYTH 2". Manezh, Moscow
1992 "Magnitsky’s Lessons. Geometric Abstraction: The Moscow Experience". Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow
1993 "Graphics". Hermitage Gallery. Central House of Artists, Moscow
"Russian Graphic Art". Museum of Fine Arts, Ankara, Turkey
"Postmodernism and National Traditions". Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
"ART MYTH 3". Manezh, Moscow
1995 "Einblicke" (Werkstatt Moscow II). Galerie im Marstall, Akademie der Kunste am Hanseatenweg, Kunstlerhof Buch, Berlin, Germany
Exhibition of artists of the "Today" gallery. Central House of Artists, Moscow
"Graphics. East-West". Galerie Salustowicz, Bielefeld, Germany
"Conspectus". Gallery "Karyatida", Nizhny Novgorod; State Art Gallery, Perm
1996 "Artoteka", National Center for Contemporary Arts. Central House of Artists, Moscow
"Ars Vienna '95". Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria
"Cow". City Museum, Cloppenburg, Germany

... The space of A. Konstantinov does not direct the structuring of the object, but rather acts as a conductor, being formed in the passive voice. In it, the principle of mutual arrangement, sympathy, and mutual acceptance is realized. It is prepared to accept structures, it is receptive and gives itself to them, yielding its form to internal models and offering them in return its order, its rights of modeling and filling. Absolute indiscernibility at the moment of its birth ("mutism" and "blindness")—the space of A. Konstantinov unfolds its content through the structures brought into it—"grids" and "stripes". Owing to this, Konstantinov's space is sacralized, its ability to partition is actualized, it acquires a "voice" and "appearance", it becomes audible and visible, in other words, meaningful and organic like a living organism, not an empty container. At this level, it can become a sign and a signal, accumulate and generate information. Moreover, Konstantinov’s plastic structures illuminate within the space a special paradigm presented by these structures, and their own order—a syntagma, i.e., a kind of text. This "text of space" has meaning and is generated as a result of the superimposition of a network, weaving, texture as matter in its "spatial" form onto living, open space.
... The world picture offered by A. Konstantinov demonstrates how the structure of consciousness changes, symbolized by discreteness, atomization, the splitting of a line into many points. Utopian thinking changes its sign, and inner freedom awakens. Modern society is obviously moving from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from uniformity to diversity, and the artist points to the trend that stands on the threshold of the future and on which that future depends. Determinism is replaced by recognition of the discrete nature of reality, and the perception of time as pure sequence is replaced by a sense of its instantaneity, its point-like nature. This type of thinking can be called ideologically wasteless, as it pursues no goal outside of itself—it is not targeted, because it is integral. In it, one thing unfolds in another, and is not derived from the other, as required by causality. Each phenomenon, each entity appears here as self-valuable, self-signifying, and at the same time—as an image of other phenomena, between which there is not domination-subordination, but correspondence and mutual involvement.
In the work of A. Konstantinov, according to R. Barthes, there is a "death of the author". He becomes an eternal copyist, signifying the truth of writing itself. It turns out that he does not project reality, but can only eternally imitate what was written before and itself was not the first writing. R. Barthes’s thesis of the "death of the author" today becomes a formula for the newest phase of minimalism. The inner essence the contemporary minimalist intends to convey is nothing but an already created dictionary, from which he draws his uninterrupted writing. Life in the art of Konstantinov is transformed into text; "it only imitates the book, and the book itself is made up of signs, itself imitates something already forgotten—and so on ad infinitum." Universalism becomes ecological, renouncing the intellectual combining and modeling of space-text and turning into instantaneous illumination, revealing in humanity’s depths its integral, indivisible "I".
V. Patsyukov. "The Dramaturgy of Point and Line". Direct and Inverse Perspective of Russian Minimalism. Lyubov Popova 1924-1994 Aleksandr Konstantinov. Feldkirch, Austria, 1994

G. Yelshevskaya. On the exhibition "Graphics of Moscow Artists", magazine "Iskusstvo", N11, 1989;
N. Danilevich "Konstantinov’s Objects", newspaper "Sovetskaya Kultura", 22.12.1990;
A. Safarova "Moscow Palette", magazine "Decorative Art", N2, 1991;
E. Gorchakova Hermitage Gallery, magazine "Decorative Art", N2, 1991.