Exhibition of Moscow photographer Alexander Syusarev "Space-Time" in Riga

The Latvian National Museum of Art is presenting works by postwar Soviet photographer
Alexander Slyusarev (1944 - 2010). On display - 60 photographs from the collections of the artist's family and a private collector in Riga.

The late Alexander Slyusarev was one of the few truly important independent postwar Soviet photographers. He took up photography in 1958 and was working in his mature style by the early 1960s. His work displays a kind of negative aesthetics that rejects the trite humanism of official Soviet art photography as well as the often-bombastic quality of the images in the Soviet press.

Slyusarev has described his work as "metaphysical" and formalist. By formalist he meant that his work was concerned not with "literary concerns" – narrative and anecdote – but with a kind of rich visual poetry based on images that are at once mundane and transcendental. Whether a photograph is a still-life of jam jar lids or the façade of a Soviet apartment block, Slyusarev’s best work is direct and refreshingly lacking the arty self-consciousness of many in the Moscow conceptualist group.

Alexander Slyusarev was born in 1944 in Moscow, Russia. He started taking pictures in 1958 with his first camera "Yunost", received as a gift from his father. He was a self- taught photographer as for a long time he worked as a professional translator from Italian, having a diploma from the Maurice Thorez Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages. In 1979 he had his first personal photography exhibition at the Latvian photo festival in Riga, Latvia. From 1974 to 1984 he created a series of black and white minimalistic "squares" taken with a Rolleiflex camera, which made the photographer famous among fellow photographers and curators. Since 1980 he had numerous
exhibitions in Russia and abroad. His photography is located in the many famous collections all around the world, including Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Odense Museum of Photography, Denmark, the Latvian Museum of Photography, Riga.

Alexander Slyusarev died on 23 April 2010 during the preparation work for his one-man show in Riga.Thus the exhibition is a dedication to the memory of this famous Russian photographer.

The exhibition "Space-Time" features 60 photographs from the collections of the artist's family and a private collector in Riga.

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