About George Kiesewalter

G. Kiesewalter's lecture on Moscow unofficial art for MOMA curators at Garage. 2017
G. Kiesewalter’s lecture on Moscow unofficial art for MOMA curators
at Garage, Moscow. 2017

George (Georgy) Kiesewalter (Rus. Георгий Кизевальтер), b. 1955, is a Moscow-based contemporary artist, photographer, archivist, art historian, and writer.

He graduated from Moscow State Pedagogical Institute in 1977. In 1976-89, he was one of the original members of the Russian conceptual performance group, Collective Actions.

​George began working as an artist around 1975. In the mid-1970s – 1980s, he was very close to the circle of Moscow artists like Ilya KabakovViktor PivovarovErik Bulatov, Ivan Chuikov et al., and actively participated in such unofficial artistic formations of the time as the AptArt movement, the Moscow Archive of New Art (MANI), and the Avantgardists’ Club in Moscow. In 1996, he decided to move to Canada, where he worked as a web designer, but eventually returned to Russia at the end of 2006.

In the late 1980s, Kiesewalter arranged a number of broadcasts on artistic and cultural issues on Radio Liberty in Munich, Germany. He is also the author, editor or co-author of several books and many articles on Russian unofficial art and the history of photography published in Russia.

​ In 1997, he received an Open Society Institute grant to help publish his first book about Moscow’s unofficial artists, The Communal Body of Moscow. He was shortlisted for the Kandinsky Prize in the category ‘Scholarly Work. History and Theory of Contemporary Art’ (Moscow, 2016).

His works can be found in many institutional and private collections, including the Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (USA), Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Museum of Modern Art, Multimedia Art Museum, and Ekaterina Cultural Foundation (all in Moscow), the Kolodzei Art Foundation (New Jersey – Moscow), and many others.