Georgy Kiesewalter
Georgy Kiesewalter (Russian: Георгий Кизевальтер, b. 1955 in Moscow) is a Russian conceptual artist, photographer and essayist. As an artist, he uses a wide range of media to communicate his concepts to the public – from painting to graphic art, from installations to conceptual photography and digital art. Biography. Georgy's ancestors were German – hence the surname, but due to his Russian origin, it has been often erroneously anglicized just as Kizevalter or Kisevalter. He graduated from Moscow Lenin Pedagogical Institute in 1977. In 1976–89, he was one of the original members of the Russian conceptual performance group Collective  Actions. In the mid 1970s – 1980s, he was very close to the circle of artists like Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov, Erik Bulatov, Ivan Chuikov et al., and actively participated in such unofficial artistic formations of the time as the AptArt movement, the Moscow Archive of New Art ("MANI"), and the Avantgardists' Club in Moscow. In 1996, he decided to move to Canada, but returned to Russia at the end of 2006. In the early 1990s, Kiesewalter arranged a number of broadcasts on arts and culture issues on "Radio Liberty" in Munich, Germany. He is also the author or co-author  of several books and many articles on contemporary art and photography published in Russia. In 1997, he received an Open Society Institute grant to help publish his first book about Moscow's unofficial artists, "The Communal Body of Moscow". His works can be found in many private and institutional collections, including the Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and the Duke University Museum of Art (USA), Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Garage Museum of  Contemporary Art and Ekaterina Cultural Foundation (all in Moscow), the Kolodzei Art Foundation (New Jersey – Moscow), and many others.