Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Jeff Koons, "Baroque Egg with Bow" (1994–2006)

Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Cy Twombly, "Untitled (6th Version Bacchus)" (2004)

Cy Twombly Mark Rothko Roy Lichtenstein Ilya Kabakov Emilia Kabakov Takashi Murakami Jeff Koons Jackson Pollock

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

MOSCOW—Überdealer Larry Gagosian set up shop on Russian soil for the second time this Wednesday, with an exhibition titled “for what you are about to receive.” Featuring a selection of artists old and new, from Willem de Kooning to Aaron Young, the show aims to present American art to an audience that is unfamiliar with it — and has money to burn.

The exhibition also ties into a longtime interest of Gagosian's — real-estate — serving as an introduction to a proposed housing complex in the former chocolate factory Red October. The 20th-century factory is an architectural landmark, thanks to its coveted location on an island just north of the Kremlin. It is owned by Guta Development, a large real-estate company that plans to convert it into spacious lofts but has decided to promote it as a cultural center for a year or so before building the actual living facilities. After the Gagosian show, the Russian gallery Regina will step in with a mix of local and internationally renowned artists.

Last October, Gagosian perked Moscow up a bit with “Insight?,” a 40-work show featuring artists from the gallery’s roster along with a large canvas by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. The show took place in the Barvikha Luxury Village — a luxury mall on a highway outside the Russian capital that is known for its constellation of posh country houses for the rich and powerful — in a space owned by Alfa-Bank, which declined to sponsor this year’s event for undisclosed reasons.

As an exhibition, the Red October show is a vast improvement over last year’s effort, where one was hard-pressed to find a single curatorial idea and where the organizers had to hang several works in the barroom. This year, there are more works, more ideas, and the space is managed better. The artworks are hung in untitled groupings to give viewers a basic idea of various art movements; there are halls for geometric abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, and large post-Pop pieces, by Jeff Koons and Aaron Young, among others. While this may seem superficial or oversimplified to the Western viewer, in Russia such an approach seems necessary, for postwar art is mostly terra incognita. The show also offers a fair share of postmodern irony: A succession of Gorky and Pollock works is diluted by a similar-looking Murakami, and somber minimalists are revitalized by a Roy Lichtenstein pastiche.

During the morning press preview, show curator Sam Orlofsky, a director at Gagosian’s New York gallery, said that the exhibition had been organized with Russian viewers in mind and was meant to serve a didactic purpose. He also said that he took special pride in showing six never-before-seen paintings by Cy Twombly, all from 2004, which hang in their own section.

Education is a good thing, of course, but when dealers educate, it is to create consumers, and Gagosian, as ever, has chosen the perfect timing for this mission. With the Kabakovs' multi-venue blockbuster retrospective opening just days before the Red October show, the dealer was able to draw many of Moscow’s richest and most powerful, as well as select international guests, to his opening — an A-list of collectors, government officials, and media magnates. (Gagosian personally thanked Daria Zhukova, who organized the Kabakov exhibition and launched her contemporary space, The Garage, with it earlier this week, for creating such a splendid environment in Moscow.) The guests ate and drank at a dinner party DJed by Paul Sevigny (brother of Chloe), who spun a selection of tunes from the 1970 and ’80s.

Another highlight of the opening was Aaron Young’s performance of “Arc Light,” a reworking of his “Greeting Card” happening at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan last summer, for which a horde of bikers make patterns on a specialized surface with the wheels of their machines. This pairing of Easy Rider with Jackson Pollock won cheers at the exhibition opening from an audience drunk on Vanilla Ice cocktails.