Radek group. Mausoleum. 09.12.1999
 

Guelman gallery,
"Brener Alexander, Kulik Oleg, Osmolovskii Anatolii, Dmitrii Petrov, Vladimir Salnikov
Marat Guelman, a gallery-owner whose artistic projects are as sharp as newspapers headlines, couldn't fail to respond to the currently fashionable theme of the forthcoming elections. A show-competition that he organized at the Polytechnic Museum was entitled "A Turn-Key Party". A vacant package of registration documents was offered to the attention of the audience. A competitor who would have won after his appearance in public, subsequent debates and a ballot, winding-up the show, would have become an owner of the package. It could have been a leader of a Movement or a Party. A prize package was real. This was not the case, however, with the majority of the competitors who showed off exclusively themselves, their mania and phobia (it has become appropriate to demonstrate those peccadilloes not only at closed in-patient departments), as well as artistic projects."

1993-09-30, Majakovsky/Osmolovsky, Majakovsky statue >>>>


Osmolovsky adresses himself to the left-radical ideology, a type of ideology which is the most discredited in the consciousness of Russians.  Ideological "ready-mades" save in their delicate appearance a semantic structure of the original source and therefore reproduce all its available catalog of signs - from images of Mayakovski and Breton to the tuft of ruffled hairs stuck together by bubble-gum, - that immediately evokes in memory of a stream of nostalgic author's references: the negation of bourgeois by cubo-futurism, the surrealists, dream of the world revolution, an the antisocial brutality of punk-rock.

Aleksandra Obukhova.  Majakovsky/Osmolovsky ("Exchange")
Catalogue of Russian-Dutch project "Exchange

August, 1993, in front of the White House (the Russian Parliament), during the days of shooting

A performance made in August, during the days when Eltsin shtoot down the Parliament and took over the White House (the building of the parliament of Russia). The performance is made in front of the curious crowd, which came to watch the tank's shooting. On the background is the burned White Huse. The tanks are situated on a street perpendivular to the street of teh parliament.
(from left to right: Vasia Shugalei, Anatolii Osmolovskii, Alexander Brener, Oleg Mavromatti)

see also

Anatoly Osmolovsky. "Leopards Bursting into a Temple...", Regina Gallery, Moscow. Video clip