Photography

The Insider show at Garage, Moscow. 2015
The Insider show at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. 2015

Since 1974, George Kiesewalter has photographed many artists, writers and poets in the nonconformist milieu in Moscow, doing his best to capture the authors’ personalities as well as their oeuvre, life and studios. The reasons for this volunteer activity were simple: that sphere of art was different from other life routines, it was special and it was fun; besides, it was no doubt a territory of freedom in a totalitarian country.

From 1974-1986, he endlessly visited Moscow artists’ studios, collecting materials and photographing their works to preserve them for the future. The artists seemed to trust him more than anyone else (and there were very few photographers in the milieu at the time) as he was also engaged in art and understood their feelings and aspirations very well.

Since then, many of those amazing images have been reproduced in books, mass media or catalogues. Probably the best album, ‘In Artists’ Studios’, was published by the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation in 2021. This selection offers an excellent example of the whole complex of Kiesewalter’s photographs, which includes such series as Artists’ Rooms and Love Me, Love My Umbrella, to name just a few.

More on his photographic works can be found here: https://cms.sothebys.com/_preview?_cms.db.previewId=00000174-b173-daa2-a5f7-b57bdeb00000&_date=