Alexander Evgenievich Ponomarev
1957: Born in Dnepropetrovsk
1973: Graduated from the art school in Orel
1979: Graduated from the Higher Marine Engineering School in Odessa
Holder of the title of Officer of the French Order of "Merit in Literature and Art".
Works in collections
Collection of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation
The State Russian Museum
The State Tretyakov Gallery
The National Museum of Modern Art named after Georges Pompidou, Paris
FNAC (National Center for Contemporary Art), Paris
FRAC (Regional Center for Contemporary Art), Brittany, France
Museum of Fine Arts of Picardy, Amiens, France
Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow
Oryol Museum of Fine Arts, Oryol, Russia
Art and Cultural Center, Kiev
Collection of the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
National Museum, Singapore
F.R. Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles, USA
Jewish Museum of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany
Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA
Universitat Jaum I, Castellón de la Plana, Spain
Museum of Fine Arts, Nizhny Tagil, Russia
Museum of Fine Arts, Yekaterinburg, Russia
Museum of Fine Arts, Krasnoyarsk, Russia
Private collections in Russia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, Singapore, USA, Poland, Denmark, Switzerland, Portugal.
Exhibitions and auctions
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1990 — Joint project with A. Konstantinov. Hermitage Gallery, Moscow
1991 — Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow
1991 — Joint project with E. Gorchakova. Gallery "East and West", Copenhagen
1992 — Gallery Espai 29, Castellón de la Plana, Spain
1993 — Gallery "6 de febrero", Valencia, Spain
1996 — Gallery "Kino", Moscow
1996 — "Ship Sunday". State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
1998 — "Breath of the Ocean". World EXPO 1998, Lisbon, Portugal
1998 — Soros Foundation Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow
2001 — Gallery "Palitra", Kharkov, Ukraine
2001 — "Maya. The Lost Island". "Krokin-gallery", Moscow
2002 — "Smoke without Fire". Andrei Sakharov Museum, Moscow
2002 — "Memory of Water". Museum of Science and Technology, Paris
2003 — "Utilization of Flocks", stage 1, project "Base"
2003 — Residence of the Ministry of Culture of France, Atelier Calder, Saché, France
2003 — "Utilization of Flocks", stage 3, project "What depth? What depth!" Exhibition Hall, Tours, France
2004 — TNT Center, Bordeaux, France
2005 — "Northern Trace of Leonardo". Nina Lumer Gallery, Milan, Italy
2005 — Rabouan-Moussion Gallery, Paris
2005 — Monument-artifact to Jules Verne in the Bay of Somme, project. Courtois Exhibition Hall, France
2006 — "In the Garden of Wolf Packs", project of the Louvre Museum. Tuileries Garden, FIAC 2006, Paris
2006 — "Narcissus Inside Out". Center for Contemporary Art "Granite", Belfort, France
2007 — "Secret Fairway", special project, 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art
2007 — Clickihope (with Julia Milner, Arseny Meshcheryakov, Andrey Bartenev, AES+F group), 52nd Venice Biennale, Russian Pavilion, Italy
2008 — "Surface Tension". Cueto Project Gallery, New York
2008 — "Viewpoint". Nina Lumer Gallery, Milan, Italy
2008 — "Come to the Surface". New National Museum of Monaco, Monte Carlo
2009 — "Subtiziano". 53rd Venice Biennale
2009 — "Sub-Zero". Studio of Wolf von Lenkiewicz, London
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
1988-92 — XVIII-XX Youth Exhibitions. House of Artists on Kuznetsky Most, Moscow
1989 — "Trans-avant-garde and Neoclassicism". Cinema Center, Moscow
1989 — XIX Youth Exhibition. Central House of Artists, Moscow
1990 — All-Union Exhibition of Young Artists. Manege, Moscow
1990 — "ART MYTH 1". Central House of Artists, Moscow
1991 — "Gruppe Я (Ja - Ich)" - "Gruppe R". Exhibition Hall on Solyanka, Moscow; Judisches Museum Rheinsburg, Regensburg; Kunstmuseum, Schleswig; Stadtmuseum, Kiel; Kunstmuseum, Humsum, Germany
1991 — "New Circle". Exhibition of artists from Ukraine, Russia and America. Martin Luther King Center, Washington; Art Center, Denver, USA
1991 — "Modern Artists to Malevich". State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
1991 — All-Union Drawing Exhibition. Central House of Artists, Moscow
1991 — "Our Contemporary". Central House of Artists, Moscow
1991 — "ART MYTH 2". Manege, Moscow
1992 — "Los tres artistas rusos". Galeria "Octubre", Castellón de la Plana, Spain
1992 — "Lessons of Magnitsky. Geometric Abstraction: The Moscow Experience". Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow
1993 — "Graphics - Hermitage". Central House of Artists, Moscow
1993 — "Russian Graphic Art". Museum of Fine Arts, Ankara, Turkey
1993 — "Postmodernism and National Traditions". State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
1993 — "ART MYTH 3". Manege, Moscow
1993 — "Ideal City. Trends in Contemporary Russian Art". National Museum, Singapore
1993 — "Russische Kunst der 60-90 Jahre". Osnabruck, Germany
1994 — "Abstract Graphics", Museum of Fine Arts, Orel
1994-95 — "Contemporary Art from the INKOMBANK Collection", Ulyanovsk Art Museum; Samara Art Museum; Magnitogorsk Art Gallery; Exhibition Hall of the Artists' Union of Chelyabinsk; Yekaterinburg Art Gallery; Omsk Museum of Fine Arts; Nizhny Novgorod Exhibition Center "Caryatid"; Art Museum, Rostov-on-Don
1995 — Arts Festival "KUKART". State Center for Contemporary Art. Tsarskoe Selo
1997 — "Credo". Russian Foundation for Culture, Moscow
"The Ocean – The Heritage of the Future". Project author and chief artist of the Russian Pavilion at the World EXPO-98
1999 — ACT99. Art-Communication Tour. Gallery of the University of Design, Linz, Austria
2000 — Auto-mobile, Polytechnic Museum, Moscow
2001 — Out of Moscow. Center for Contemporary Art, Campair, France
2001 — Abstraction in Russia. XX century. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
2002 — La toison d'or. Apollonia, Strasbourg, France
2003 — Moscow Abstraction. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
2004 — Passage d'Europe. Museum of Modern Art, Saint-Étienne, France
2005 — 1st Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, special project. Moscow
2006 — ARS 06, Kiasma, Helsinki
2007 — Zeitgeist. Cueto Project, New York, USA
2007 — I Believe! Center for Contemporary Art "Winzavod", Moscow
2009 — "Feedbacks". 3rd Biennale of Contemporary Art (Moscow)
2009 — 53rd Venice Biennale, Italy
ACTIONS
1995 — "Ship Sunday" action. Baltic Sea
1996 — "Northern Trace of Leonardo" object-action. Arctic Ocean
2000 — "Maya. The Lost Island" action. Barents Sea
2001 — "Journey from Nepal to Tibet", the Himalayas
2003 — "Cruise" performance-action. Art-Klyazma contemporary art festival, Moscow region, Russia
2003 — "Utilization of Flocks" object-action Stage 3. "What depth? What depth!". Loire River, Tours, France
2003 — Project "Utilization of Flocks", stage 2, object-action "Mobile in Mobile", Action performed in the Mediterranean Sea (Thessaloniki, Cassis, Marseille, Sagunto, Valencia)
2003 — "Floating Artistic Studios". Project of the association "Apollonia", Strasbourg, France
2004 — "Topology of Absolute Zero" action. The research ship "Academician Sergey Vavilov" and the ship "Academician Ioffe", Antarctica
2005 — "Hopeless Mail" action. Southern Ocean
2006 — "Baffin Figure" action. The ship "Academician Ioffe", Baffin Sea, Arctic
2006 — "Deepwater Graphics" action. The ship "Academician Ioffe", Baffin Sea, Arctic
Author about himself
Abstract topographies of the world are the central theme of my work. I look from above on the earth and ocean, I invent continents, bays, rivers. Positive and negative shapes in my compositions are balanced, creating a structure of interdependence. It doesn't matter what signifies power or the sea; the boundaries are more important than the fields of color. I am an artist of boundaries. I search at the boundary of water and land. On the boundary between black and white, color is born. All the drama of life is manifested at the borders.
Critic
To take on the work of Alexander Ponomarev is to enter into essentially shifting terrain, where that which one had ventured to take for granted or assumed as obvious, subsequently begins to move, evade, disappear. For the art of Ponomarev is above all interstitial, in the sense that he explores solutions of continuity, spaces of friction and dynamic encounter between the various fields of “reality.” For him, the frontier – which he defines as the place where he situates himself, where and from where he operates – is not a line demarcating set territories that ought to be crossed, bypassed, moved, or destroyed, but rather a space-time in motion within and beginning from which this “reality” can be re-examined, “re-subjectified,” re-activated. Recycled. — Anne Landréat, Paris 2004
In a certain sense, the history of contemporary art is the story of its liberation from the traditional confines of the easel, the pedestal, and the studio. Performance, video, computer art—these are symptoms or consequences of that breakthrough, which parallels our increasing ability to compress time and space through instantaneous mechanisms.
Moscow artist Alexander Ponomarev paints on the decks, bridges, and sides of aging ships at shipyards. His marine art, the art of doomed vessels, is also part of this centrifugal process. Even in the swirl of contemporary Russian art, Ponomarev occupies a unique place: he rejects the logic of blind dependence on electronic images, on imposed uniformity and submission to generally accepted aesthetic categories, on substituting art with the artist's persona. For Ponomarev, the artist is still a captain endowed with special powers of inspiration that are expressed in created objects—whether it be a painting or a poem.
— J. Bowlt, from the article "Wreckart – Art of Old Ships", booklet for the "Ship Sunday" exhibition, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 1996.
Works 16
