If Russian contemporary art was born in the 1990s, given life by the collapse of Communism, it is now an awkward teenager hitting a growth spurt fueled by collectors flush with oil money. Adolescence is simultaneously exciting and confusing, and both emotions are on display at Moscow’s Vinzavod art district, which has become the heart of the country’s art scene since its inauguration early last year. It seems only yesterday that the city’s few decent galleries were widely dispersed and experiencing sporadic activity; now several are clustered in still-raw former winery buildings with soaring ceilings and plenty of parking space out front for collectors.

As prices at auction mount for work by the post-1960s generation of Russian artists, a crop of younger ones is coming up. Auspicious signs have been appearing everywhere for some time, promoting hopes that Russian art will someday have the same cachet that Chinese work does now. The 2005 “Russia!” exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York had a section devoted to contemporary pieces. The momentum carried through to last year’s second Moscow Biennale, which brought to the city the most prominent members of the jet-setting art world. The contemporary fair Art Moscow has been getting more attention, too, and will hold its 13th edition in May.

New institutions have flourished, most notably two founded by private collectors to show off their holdings. Last March, construction magnate Vladimir Semenikhin established the Yekaterina Cultural Foundation, named after his wife; two months later, plastics magnate Igor Markin opened a considerably more idiosyncratic museum of Russian contemporary art in various media, where visitors can vote on which works please them most.

Of course, there’s a downside to all this frenetic activity—teenage angst, as it were. For one thing, very few of the new institutions are dedicated to supporting and developing contemporary art. A few glamorous-sounding projects exist—such as the new space in St. Petersburg’s famous State Hermitage Museum devoted to pieces from Charles Saatchi’s collection, part of a larger effort by the museum to solidify its commitment to work being made now. But these don’t supply the same kind of countrywide art infrastructure found in the United States and Western Europe.

According to Nicholas Iljine, the Guggenheim director of corporate development in Europe and the Middle East, who is of Russian descent himself, “There are no adequate state-funded spaces for contemporary art apart from the modest activities of the National Center for Contemporary Arts.” A related problem is the lack of contemporary-art education—one exception being the postgraduate course at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow, which two-time Moscow Biennale commissioner Joseph Backstein founded in 1991.

Moreover, the sense of estrangement from the rest of the world that characterized the Soviet era hasn’t gone away, and Russia is somewhat removed from the larger international contemporary-art scene. “We are still quite isolated,” admits Backstein.

One barrier to Russia’s greater integration in the art world is simply the difficulty of its language and its alphabet. But outsiders also haven’t acquired the cultural background necessary to understand the art coming out of the country. Says Aidan Salakhova, an artist and one of Moscow’s first gallerists, “European and American curators come here and look through the frame of art that they have. It’s not possible. You need context to understand and accept [what we’re producing].”

Government censorship can still be an obstacle as well. Last fall, the Russian minister of culture prevented an artwork by the Blue Noses group that depicts two policemen kissing in a snowy landscape from traveling to Paris for an exhibition of political art.

One thing is certain: The contemporary-art scene has embraced the open market as much as—or more than—the rest of the booming Russian economy has. The fast pace of commercial gallery development in Moscow even has some collectors concerned. “Every day there is a new gallery opening and a new show. It’s too much going on,” says Russian-born collector Janna Bullock, now a New York–based real estate developer. “This is normal for an emerging market, but it seems a little artificial. I hope it will slow down a bit.”

It’s not surprising that in a country where some speculate that all the frantic art buying is no more than creative money laundering by a few oligarchs, fragmentation prevails in the cultural realm. “There isn’t a connection between the art market and institutions,” says London dealer Anya Stonelake, who has exhibited work by Oleg Kulik, Olga Chernysheva and Valéry Chtak. “Last year loads of collectors went to Russia, but the art market is not quite ready yet. Some artists are selling things directly, and there are only a few good galleries.”

Although several of the most prominent galleries are now neighbors in Moscow’s Vinzavod district, enabling them to begin coordinating their opening nights, most of them aren’t yet particularly adept at marketing their exhibitions. They don’t do much advertising, nor do they regularly make catalogues for their artists. “It’s been more of a quick-sell business,” says Iljine.

For his part, Backstein thinks that the buying frenzy is really caused by a mismatch of supply and demand. “The problem of Russia is that we have a lot of collectors now and not enough artists,” he says. Iljine adds, “There are plenty of artists, but after 70 years of Communism, individuality is not blossoming as fast as in the free West and East.” His hope is that new talent in the more isolated provinces will soon be uncovered, with help from the brand-new Kandinsky Prize, Russia’s equivalent of Britain’s Turner Prize, sponsored by Deutsche Bank AG and the Moscow-based Art Chronika Culture Foundation.

Part of what is driving interest in contemporary Russian art is the entry of Russian collectors into the auction market. Recent sales have produced a number of records, especially for work by the post-1960s generation—the same generation, Phillips de Pury & Company head Simon de Pury points out, whose work he sold in Moscow in 1988 for all-time highs at a now-legendary Sotheby’s auction that briefly created a price bubble.

Last June at Phillips in London, La chambre de luxe, a 1981 two-panel painting of a domestic interior by Conceptualist Ilya Kabakov, made just over $4 million, setting the record for a work of contemporary Russian art at auction. Kabakov, 74, left Moscow in the 1980s and now lives and works in collaboration with his wife, Emilia, in New York; he had garnered an international following by the 1980s, mainly for large-scale installations in which he told the history of the Soviet regime through partial biographies of invented characters.

Like Kabakov, other nonconformists who rejected Soviet state ideology and Socialist Realism have also seen peak prices lately. A 1987 painting by hyperrealist Eric Bulatov, in which block Cyrillic letters spelling out the words Ne Prislonyatsa (Do Not Lean) hover over a hyperrealistic forest, made an artist’s record £916,000 ($1.8 million) at the same Phillips sale. Bulatov is still painting at age 74, and he had his first Russian retrospective at the State Tretyakov Gallery two years ago. A major retrospective of Kabakov’s work this fall will be split among several Moscow venues, including the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the Vinzavod.

The Ukrainian-born Kulik, 47, is best known for abrasive performances in the mid-1990s during which he imitated a dog, right down to wearing a collar and sitting in a cage, once going so far in his verisimilitude as to bite a curator. Publicity-generating actions like those have been credited with energizing the Russian art scene. Kulik is as famous for his curating as he is for his art making and has become something of a father figure to the current group of young Russian artists. Last year brought both a midcareer survey of his
own work at Moscow’s Central House of Artists and the vast Kulik-curated “I Believe” exhibition of Russian artists exploring the concept of faith, which coincided with the second Moscow Biennale and was the inaugural show in the Vinzavod art district. In addition to established galleries like Aidan, Regina and XL, the Vinzavod now encompasses studios for Kulik and several other artists.

Vinogradov and Dubossarsky, both 44, also emerged in the 1990s, with canvases in which they exploited their training in the strict Socialist Realist figurative tradition to depict imagery from popular culture. Their paintings, featuring an airbrushed look and often dreamy pastel colors, are particularly market-friendly, so it’s not surprising to hear considerable auction buzz about them. Their record price came at Phillips last June, when Night Fitness, a 2004 painting of a woman doing push-ups in a swimming pool, went for £132,000 ($263,000), against a high estimate of £20,000 ($39,556). The duo seems to have a sense of humor about their success. Two years ago they made news when they had a major exhibition at a yacht club outside Moscow and employed a team of eight prominent Russian businessmen to create a painting under their instruction.

As for the St. Petersburg–based Mamyshev-Monroe, 39, his first taste of fame came when he covered Moscow with posters of himself imitating Marilyn Monroe, his namesake. Three years ago, for a show of Russian Pop art at the Tretyakov Gallery, he remade Warhol’s Marilyn silkscreens with himself in the starring role. And he recently won the Kandinsky Prize in the new-media category for a video in which his visage replaces that of an actress in a well-known Russian film from the 1930s. A 2006 photograph in which Mamyshev-Monroe presents himself in the guise of Queen Elizabeth I just set a record of €10,000 ($14,700), against an estimate of €4,000 ($5,800), at a charity auction Phillips held during Moscow’s recent luxury-goods expo, Millionaire Fair.

But the “starz” who have risen most dramatically in the past year are the members of AES+F. The Moscow-based collective, formed in the mid-1980s, includes Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes. Their slick digitized videos and photographs have lately portrayed preteens in poses worthy of Gap ads, dressed like warriors and doing slow-motion battle in a postapocalyptic landscape. Last Riot, a three-channel video of that scenario set to a Wagner sound track, was among the biggest crowd-pleasers at the Venice Biennale last summer. Many have attributed the group’s success to its representation by Triumph, a Moscow gallery that recently transitioned from showing Old Masters to bringing work by Damien Hirst and other international art celebrities to a Russian audience.

Perhaps the proof is in the prices. Most contemporary Russian artists do not yet command what their European and American peers do. AES+F is the exception: Last Riot is now entirely sold out, and the gallery is considering hawking artists’ proofs for around $400,000. That is about what you’d pay for a modest-size work by American video-art superstar Bill Viola.

In a country with little art infrastructure, biennials are crucial, as evidenced by the lift that Venice gave AES+F. Performance and installation artist Andrey Bartenev is another graduate of the 2007 Russian pavilion there. Since that appearance, he has become virtually ubiquitous on the international scene, showing up at parties in his eye-catching, outrageously patterned bodysuits. In January, London’s Riflemaker gallery opened Bartenev’s first solo show, which consisted of a version of the piece he presented at Venice, Disco-Nexion, an installation of mirrors, glass and colored lights that creates an infinity effect and is meant to comment on the perils of electronic communication. Riflemaker director Tot Taylor says the show sold out within 40 minutes of the opening. “There is a mad rush for his work in London,” she adds.

Even though the Moscow scene is heating up, the support of gallerists abroad is crucial if these artists are to make their names internationally. Impressed with the Russian pavilion, Rachel Lehmann, co-director of the New York gallery Lehmann Maupin, wasted no time in visiting Moscow’s artist studios. There she discovered the Grozny-born Alexey Kallima, 38, who makes figurative drawings and frescolike paintings, many of them depicting the Chechen struggle, and Kirill Chelushkin, 39, who became known for large, meticulous landscape drawings and now constructs elaborate sculptures from Styrofoam onto which he projects such imagery as the changing Moscow cityscape. Lehmann plans to show both artists in New York over the summer.

Her decision to present those two was cemented when she stopped in Paris last September after her Moscow trip to take in the exhibition “Moscopolis” at the Louis Vuitton emporium on the Champs-Élysées. The powerful LVMH Foundation, run by luxury-goods magnate Bernard Arnault, was behind the show, for which new works were created by Chelushkin and Kallima—both of whom already show in French galleries—plus a handful of other Russian stars, from midcareer figures like Kulik and Valéry Koshlyakov to young talent like 26-year-old Chtak.

Carefully timed international showcasing like this is giving Russians the same attention that has lately been going to artists from other emerging economies, such as China and India. Following close on the heels of “Moscopolis” was “Russia Miami,” curated by the Hermitage’s Julie Sylvester and sponsored by collector Janna Bullock, which took place during Art Basel in December in Miami’s Design District. Two standouts from the show were Ukrainian-born photographer Sergei Bratkov, who makes jarring, often humorous color photographs of ordinary Russians, and St. Petersburg–based Sergei Bugaev, a highly political artist known as Afrika who was represented in Miami by an antique sleigh decked out to look like a rickety ship, a potent metaphor for his home country.

Yet what characterizes the young Russian artists of today is their resistance to ghettoization by nationality. “I don’t think there is a brand of Russian art,” says the New York dealer Daneyal Mahmood, who discovered Peter Belyi at Russia Miami’s 2006 predecessor, Modus R, and eventually sold one of the young sculptor’s pieces to the respected Miami collector Martin Margulies. “I feature mostly political art, and what these artists are speaking to is more global than local.”

Michael Gillespie, of New York’s Foxy Production gallery, agrees. He represents Chernysheva, 44, who began as a painter and sculptor but now makes videos and photographs of such mundane subjects as workers in the Moscow metro system, lending them dignity through her poetic approach. Her pieces appeared in the “Moscopolis” show and are in the collection of the LVMH Foundation. “We won’t be positioning her as Russian,” says Gillespie. “We want to present her as an international artist.”

The tensions between those approaches are visible at Sotheby’s, which last year conducted its first sale in a specially created contemporary Russian-art category, setting some 25 artist’s records in the process. Specialist Joanna Vickery explains that the house’s policy going forward is to present one post-1960s Russian sale per year; the next one takes place in London on March 12. But high prices for artists like Bulatov have also been coming to the attention of specialists in the general contemporary-art department.

In the end, there may be enough to go around. “The Russian contemporary market is fairly young as a whole,” says Vickery. “And across the board one can expect it will appreciate in value.”

"Eastern Promises" originally appeared in the March 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's March 2008 Table of Contents.