The Russian Pavilion
at the 56th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia

May 9–November 22, 2015
Giardini, Venice

The Green Pavilion

Artist: Irina Nakhova
Curator: Margarita Tupitsyn
Commissioner: Stella Kesaeva

Organizers: The Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the Stella Art Foundation, Moscow

The Russian Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia will present Irina Nakhova’s The Green Pavilion. Since the mid-1970s, Nakhova (b. 1955) has made a significant contribution to the development of Moscow Conceptualism, infusing its logocentric model with visual intensity and a critical edge. In the early 1980s, using one of the rooms in her Moscow apartment, Nakhova embarked on a series of environments entitled “Rooms.” The series anticipated Ilya Kabakov’s iconic Moscow installation The Man Who Flew into the Cosmos from His Room, which he later dubbed a “total installation.” Both artists made the step into three-dimensional space as a revolt against the stagnating conditions of the production and reception of Moscow vanguard art in the pre-perestroika era. Together with the Russian Pavilion curator, Margarita Tupitsyn, an internationally renowned expert on the Russian avant-garde and contemporary art, Nakhova has here realized a series of ambitious environments that revisit the paradigms of the Russian avant-garde, as well as explore and redefine Nakhova’s concepts of spatial relations and viewer interaction.

Stella Art Foundation
The Stella Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization established in Moscow in November 2003 on the initiative of Stella Kesaeva. The foundation is dedicated to supporting contemporary art, with a special focus on encouraging scholarship in the field of Moscow conceptual art. It maintains a collection of over one thousand artworks from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Stella Art Foundation has carried out approximately one hundred projects by Russian and foreign artists both in Russia and abroad.