Vadim Sidur. Blooming Time

About the exhibition

The Vadim Sidur Museum and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art present the BLOOMING TIME project, the first in this year's series of temporary exhibitions that are ogranized around the metaphorical image of a blooming garden as a lost and found paradise. The exhibition will feature sculptures and graphics by Vadim Sidur from various periods of his work as well as artworks from the collection of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.

The sharp contrast of themes, the intertwining conflicting motifs of the universal human catastrophe and the ultimate love of life are at the heart of the works of Vadim Sidur, whose art was largely informed by both his tragic war experience and his admiration for the most vivid manifestations of life.

The intersection of these opposites is represented in the exhibition by the dual image of a blooming garden of Eden as a place of abundance and enjoyment, as well as exile and loss. For Sidur, such a place was his parents' house in Alabino near Moscow, his refuge and creative laboratory. It was there that during the warmer months he created many of his works, as well as his poetry cycle The Happiest Autumn, but at the end of the season he inevitably returned to his Basement workshop on Chudovka Street. The materials of Vadim Sidur's sculptures on display, 'inanimate' metal and 'living' wood, emphasize the dual nature of his images.

In the exhibition, works from the collection of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art enter into a dialogue with Vadim Sidur's works, and act as a semantic resonator exposing the theme of a blooming garden in all its contradictory completeness, which helps understand how the sculptor's legacy continues to live and transform in the contemporary context.

About the artist

Vadim Sidur (1924 – 1986) was a prominent representative of Soviet unofficial art in the second half of the twentieth century. His biography is a story of a man that went through the hardships of the 1930s, evacuation, a severe injury from fighting in World War II, and subsequent rejection by the official culture community. A man who, through his dedication to the chosen path, managed to find the most accurate language for expressing the inexpressible and securing a unique place in the history of post-war art.

Vadim Sidur's artistic legacy is diverse and includes more than five hundred sculptures and about a thousand graphic sheets; an experimental film Monument to the Modern Condition, shot in 1974; a posthumously published collection of poems The Happiest Autumn and an autobiographical novel MYTH. Monument to the Modern Condition, which he had been working on for many years, collecting memories, observations and everyday sketches. Vadim Sidur's monumental sculptures have been installed in Russia, Germany and the USA.

VADIM SIDUR MUSEUM

In 2018, the Vadim Sidur Museum became part of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and it has grown to be much more than just a place for storing and representing the artist's legacy. Today, it is a venue that explores and develops the current cultural agenda.

The museum's collection contains more than 1,000 sculptures and graphic works by Vadim Sidur, as well as multiple archival materials. The museum works with the collection in a dynamic way through cutting-edge approaches to designing exhibitions.

The museum's collection contains Russian and foreign publications about Vadim Sidur, exhibition catalogues, research collections, fiction books illustrated by Sidur, a series of poetry collections Evenings at the Sidur Museum, as well as literature on the theory of contemporary culture and art.