Art of the Diehl

© 2008 Jenny Holzer, Member Artist Rights Society (ARS), NY/Courtesy of the artist and Monika Spruth Philomene Magers/Diehl + Gallery One, Moscow

Jenny Holzer's "Torso" (2008), from Volker Diehl's first Russian show

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Diehl has made several trips to Moscow annually since 1996 and in the past two or three years has noticed that “the whole scene has become more and more open-minded,” with Muscovites, led by young collectors popularly referred to as “minigarchs,” embracing international art. “So I made the decision early last year,” he says.

Diehl + Gallery One, the city’s first and only Western gallery, opened its doors last month in an imposing 1940s Stalinist building on a main drag, the Smolenskaya, near the White House, the Russian Federation parliament building. The sprawling, 6,500- square-foot ground-floor exhibition space has 20-foot-high ceilings, tall enough to accommodate the inaugural show, “Like Truth,” of recent LED installations and paintings by Jenny Holzer ($25,000–500,000). The second project, running from May 22 to June 30, is “Glasnost/Perestroika,” a sampling of Russian political art from the 1980s and ’90s, which Diehl has personally collected for years. (Later the exhibition travels to Haunch of Venison in London.)

“I’m sure more Western galleries will follow,” says Diehl. “It’s nice to be the first rather than the 12th or 15th.”

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