Conversation Piece
The go-to gallery for Russian avant-garde art, Galerie Gmurzynska adds Christo to the mix for Art Basel in Hong Kong, writes Payal Uttam
’ est incroyable. what a show,” coos a stylish European collector clad headto-toe in black inside Galerie Gmurzynska’s booth at Art Basel in Miami Beach. Minutes later, Sean Combs, aka P Diddy, dressed in a hot pink baseball jacket and sunglasses, saunters in, strikes up a conversation with a gallerist and snaps a few photographs. Meanwhile, near the entrance, Norman Rosenthal, the exuberant British curator, weaves through the crowd and pulls a friend inside. “You see, it’s like a mini-museum,” he says, gesturing proudly at the experimental works by the Russian avant-garde. Next to him sits Pablo Picasso’s son Claude Ruiz-picasso, the booth designer, enjoying a pause before the next wave of collectors descends. This collision of celebrities, scholars and historic names in the art world is characteristic of the Swiss gallery, which mounted one of the most impressive exhibitions at the Miami fair in December. Titled The Future is Our Only Goal, it was a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution. For the booth, Ruiz-picasso managed to conjure the spirit at large around 1917, a time of great optimism in the Russian art world. “They did very radical things at that moment,” he says, referring to the artists on view, including Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko and Mikhail Larionov. “I wanted to please them with something they could not have done but they would have liked.” So he plastered the booth’s walls with enlarged archival Russian photographs. He turned some images upside down, including a scene of an aerobics-like fitness session so women’s legs are seen as almost flying above artworks, adding a playful element to the space.