Georgy Ostretsov

Georgy Ostretsov is an artist, designer and curator who has been part of the Moscow art scene since the mid-1980s. He was born to the Georgian sculptor Elguja Amashukeli and the art historian Lyudmila Ostretsova, and studied at the Theatrical and Art School attached to the Bolshoi Theatre.

In the 1980s he belonged to the “Detsky Sad” (Kindergarten) art collective, which took over an empty kindergarten for its studio, and he was a member of the “Novye Khudozhniki” (New Artists) association in Leningrad. His early work was in costume: constructivism and the agitprop of the 1920s crossed with New Wave aesthetics, fashion and performance held together in one gesture.

In 1988 he moved to Paris and stayed for a decade, working with the designers Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and Jean-Paul Gaultier and with the director Luc Besson. He has been based in Moscow again since 1998.

In 2009 Georgy Ostretsov represented Russia at the 53rd Venice Biennale. In 2010 he founded the art community “Vglaz”, and later the group “Yeli Kuka” (They Ate Cook).

His work builds an iconography of its own and tells graphic stories. Unlike Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein, he does not appropriate existing illustration: he draws his own narrative, close in manner to action comics. He works across media — installation that brings together painting, graphics and sculpture — and also writes texts and graphic novels.

“Masterpieces are created on the crest of a revelation of life and time, when time itself creates the need for a particular art. A work that remains as a sign of its epoch, a sign of the time, cannot be judged; it stands outside the position from which one judges.”

Georgy Ostretsov's works are held by the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the State Russian Museum (Saint Petersburg), the Moscow Museum of Modern Art of the Russian Academy of Arts (Moscow), the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic (Saint Petersburg), the Sigmund Freud Museum of Dreams (Saint Petersburg), the Saatchi Gallery (London), the Zabludowicz Collection (London) and the Troche DeLeon Collection (Israel), as well as in the private collections of Frederik Paulsen, Laurence Graff, Roman Abramovich, Simon de Pury and others.