YURI LEIDERMAN – CIRCLES AND LUMPS
Škuc Gallery, January 20 - March 7 1999
Yuri Leiderman (born in 1963 in Odessa) works in Moscow, where he held his first exhibition in 1983. In 1987 together with Sergei Anufriev and Pavel Pepperstein, he founded the "Medical Hermeneutics" group, which he left in 1990 and has been working independently ever since. He has shown his work at numerous solo and group exhibitions. Recently, he has exhibited at some of the major events in contemporary art, such as in 1996 at the Rotterdam Manifesta and at the last year's Sydney biennial. Yuri Leiderman's artistic production is highly heterogeneous, for it is not focused on a specific visual form. Rather, it subjects the form to precisely defined concepts which systematically connect different sciences, literature, philosophy and art phenomena with personal stories, obsessions and artistic investigation. For the exhibition at the Škuc Gallery, the artist has devised a concept which connects various conceptual works of art (produced between 1995-1999) into a whole. This whole gives off a formal impression which could be best described as a minimal abstraction or a visual effect which is not created directly but by means of sophisticated personal stories and manipulations, on which individual works are based. Yuri Leiderman comes from the tradition of Moscow conceptualism which became internationally renown mostly through works of Ilya Kabakov, the only artist from this circle to have exhibited so far in Ljubljana. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue which will present individual works (installations) exhibited for the first time in the Škuc Gallery. In April 1999 the exhibition will move from Ljubljana to the Studio Tommaseo gallery of Trieste. On Thursday, January 21 1999 at 7 p.m. in the Škuc Gallery, the artist will hold an lecture entitled "Calm Calculation of Non-Existing Things".
The project is sponsored by the City of Ljubljana - Department of Culture, Kultur Kontakt, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and OSI-Slovenia, OSI-Russia, Cultural Link Programme. Thanks to: Fakulteta za kemijo in kemijsko tehnologijo, Mestni muzej Ljubljana, podjetje Sanolabor, Srednja kemijski šoli, Srednja šoli za elektrotehniko in računalništvo, Veleposlaništvo Ruske federacije v Ljubljani. Special thanks to: Vadim Fiškin, Mojca Dimec, Cveta Černec.
