Boris Messerer. Kaleidoscope of Time

About the exhibition

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art is launching a major solo exhibition of Boris Messerer, a set designer, painter, and graphic artist who for 70 years has been crystallizing his art explorations and individual style in a wide variety of genres, from set design to book illustrations. The exhibition will feature more than 150 works that will demonstrate the range of

Boris Messerer’s creative methods and cover the period from the late 1950s to the 2020s. The project will include mock-ups for theatrical productions, installations, watercolours, etchings, and paintings with a special emphasis on early ones. Boris Messerer's creative versatility was informed by his family and social circle: his father was a ballet-master and choreographer Assaf Messerer, his mother Anel Sudakevich was a silent film actress and a costume designer, and his cousin was ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. From his childhood, the future artist was surrounded by people of theatre, ballet, cinema. Atmosphere of arts synthesis inevitably shaped the artist's personality and vision, his way of representing reality and its artistic 'reassembly'. 

The title of the exhibition Kaleidoscope of Time reflects both the nature and the essence of the presented works. These paintings, set designs, etchings always feature a complex colour scheme, and abstractions are always polychrome: their very shape resembles stained glass pieces in a kaleidoscope that rearrange into dynamic figures; profiles and outlines in still lifes are layered, doubled, which produces rhythms and echoes. The works presented in the project outline the creative landscape that showcases the diversity, variability and development of certain plastic and formative features within a long-term retrospective, while more recent works confirm the artist's fidelity to his artistic language. Finally, the works capture the zeitgeist of each decade: portraits of contemporaries from the 1960s, the workshop that became an informal cultural centre in the 1970s, and late poetic watercolour landscapes of the 2000s and 2010s with views of Tarusa which the artist has returned to for decades. The exhibition will become a kaleidoscope that will summarize the artist's exceptional career in a single space and will introduce to the general audience the early little-known but exceptionally fruitful and significant years in his creative journey. 

The exhibition is built around Boris Messerer's early works from the late 1950s and the 1960s, a period of bold and innovative research in the then dangerous field of unofficial nonconformist art. The main subjects of these canvases are still lifes with simple everyday objects, portraits of friends and family, modest interiors, landscapes. The unique expressiveness of the images is enabled by the freedom of artistic techniques, the minimalism and conciseness of the visual language. Contrasting large-scale abstract compositions in the next section of the exhibition convey a completely different spirit, this part is designed to immerse the audience in a 'kaleidoscopic' hall of colour, form and time: the earliest abstractions here were made in 1960, and the latest, in 2020. This space will also feature large allegoric installations from the MMOMA collection. 

A very important part of Boris Messerer's creative career is about theatre. Mock-ups for set designs and canvases with scenes from the productions will be presented together, as a synthesis of selected theatrical works, invariably imbued with the author's individuality. Audience will find themselves in a treasure room that features symbols from stage, dance, music and images of international and Russian culture which the artist engages with. The theme of ballet, closely linked with Boris Messerer's biography and art, is represented in a large-format series depicting ballerinas, executed in a manner that seems to convey the very concept of plasticity and grace, quietly and gracefully embodying the potential of the artistic movement. The exhibition is complemented by archival photographs and an interview shot in Boris Messerer's famous workshop on Povarskaya Street specifically for this project. In it, Boris shares his memories of his creative career and comments on the works presented at the exhibition

Curatorial group

Mikhail Mindlin, Vladimir Prokhorov, Elena Milanovskaya

About the artist

Boris Messerer was born in Moscow on March 15, 1933.

Besides Moscow, he spent his early years in Polenovo and Tarusa: he considers them to be his homeland and has kept love for these dear and spiritual places through his whole life.

In 1956, Boris graduated from the Architectural Institute. While studying, he also attended Arthur Fonvizin’s workshop, where he mastered watercolour technique. A milestone of his creative career was creating the Moscow panel for the Soviet pavilion of the World Industrial Exhibition in Brussels. In 1960, he designed the set for his first performance, The Third Wish, based on Vratislav Blazek’s play, at the Sovremennik Theatre. In 1963, he debuted as a set designer at the Bolshoi Theater, designing the set for the ballet Lieutenant Kijé to Sergei Prokofiev's music. He actively collaborated with major Russian and foreign directors of different generations. From 1990 to 1997, he was chief designer of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre. Boris Messerer also worked a lot in book graphics. He collaborated with many Moscow publishing houses (Iskusstvo, Soviet Writer, RTO, Politizdat, Soviet Music), and designed the Samizdat almanac Metropol. Boris Messerer is an Academician and Member of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Arts, winner of the Silver and Gold Medals of the Russian Academy of Arts and the Order for Service to Art (2013). Boris Messerer is based in Moscow.