Born 1939, Leningrad
Lives and works in New York

Selected Exhibitions

My Leningrad, Young Artists Division, Artists’ Union, Leningrad, Russia
Art d’Aujourdhui, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris
Betty Parsons Gallery, New York
Russian Émigré Artists, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York
Elaine Benson Gallery, Bridgehampton, New York
La Pienture Russe Contemporaine, Palais de Congres, Paris
La Nuova Arte Sovietica, La Bienalle de Venezia, Italy
La Bienalle di Turin, Italy
East West Gallery, Kyoto, Japan
Eduard Nakhamkin Fine Arts, New York
C.A.S.E Museum of Contemporary Russian Art, New Jersey
Les Dissidents Russe, Chateau de Vascoeuil, France
Retrospective: 1957 – 1987, Gallery Hermitage, Moscow
Transit: Russian Artists Between East and West, Eduard Nakhamkin Fine Arts, New York;
Fine Arts Museum of Long Island; State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg;
Central Exhibition Hall, Krymski Val, Moscow
Golda Meir Association, New York
Kunst im Verborgenen: Nonkonformisten Russland: 1957 – 1995, Documenta Halle, Kassel;
Staatliches Lindenau Museum, Germany; Manege, Moscow
A World Through These Eyes, The State Cheboksary Art Museum, Russia
The History of Contemporary Russian Art in Portraits: 1956 – 1996, Travelling exhibition.
Nizhni Novgorod, Samara, Perm, Novosibirsk, Ekaterinburg, Russia
Forbidden Art: The Postwar Russian Avant-garde, Pasadena College of Design, California;
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow;
Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio
In Focus: The Sculpture of Alexander Ney, Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, NC
300th Anniversary of St. Petersburg and Yale University, Russian Consulate, New York
La Colección de Jean-Jacques Guéron: 1960 – 2000, Centro de Cultura Castillo de Maya,
Fundacion Caja Navarra, Pamplona, Spain
Portraits, Mimi Ferzt Gallery, New York
New Acquisitions, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA
Alexander Ney: a retrospective, Mimi Ferzt Gallery, New York

Museum Collections

The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
The State Tsaritsino Museum of Art, Moscow
Museum Beeldan aan Zee, The Netherlands
Nasher Museum of Art (formerly Duke University Museum of Art), Durham, NC
Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
C.A.S.E. Museum of Contemporary Russian Art, Jersey City, NJ
Yeshiva University Museum, New York
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ALEXANDER NEY
“a retrospective”
October 28 – November 14, 2004

Mimi Ferzt Gallery is pleased to present ALEXANDER NEY “a retrospective” opening October 28, 2004. Alexander Ney is an internationally recognized sculptor who emigrated from Russia to France in 1972 and then to New York two years later. The show marks the artist’s first in-depth retrospective exhibition and will feature thirty works spanning over 40 years of the sculptor’s career.

Alexander Ney’s terra-cotta sculptures recall the organic forms of early civilizations. Inspired by Henry Moore’s use of the hole to incorporate negative space into the sculptural form, Ney’s masterful technique involves delicate carving into each sculpture to create intricate geometric patterns covering the surface of the works. The carved squares and circles mimic the forms of the sculpture and give them an otherworldly aura. These complex works invoke both the mystery and austerity of an ancient relic and belong to the modern aesthetic.

The artist focuses on the human head- the core of our emotional and intellectual being. His portraits are timeless and recall the solemnity of the Greek Deities or Aztec Rulers. Their punctured surfaces reveal notions of distance and solitude. Each work is an original persona saturated with character and emotion. In the sculpture Companion, 1993, the upturned nose and wide-eyed stare suggest an ancient cohort frozen in mid-sentence.

Alexander Ney worked extensively in Moscow and Leningrad during the 1960s and 70s. During this period Ney refused to accept the ideologies of Soviet Socialist Realism by joining the underground artist movement. He is represented in European, Russian and American collections including The State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, The Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University and The Yeshiva University Museum in New York and has exhibited extensively at prestigious galleries and museums worldwide.

The opening reception is October 28, 2004 from 7 to 9 pm.

A catalogue of the exhibition is available upon request.

THE ARTIST’S METHOD IN ART

About fifty years ago, when I was maturing as a person and developing as an artist, I came to the understanding of how I would apply life and art, with all their complexities, to my artistic method. I tried to understand what talent is. What does the term “talent” mean to me? I realized that if one was to be an artist, one’s only worth was talent. I looked at my fellow contemporaries in my art school for examples and differences in various talents. Some students were very painstakingly exact, while others were trying to be very intellectual and let us know of their unusual art theories. Some were very dry; others picturesque, all demonstrating different forms and levels of talent. My question became, what is the best to follow? I understood that good art caused a positive emotional stir. I saw that raw intellectualism or fine physical execution both suffered and lost much of their meaning and force when the artist was not emotionally moved and did not infuse feeling into their art. There exists both a projected extroverted happiness and a quiet inner happiness. So I worked on that process, to see if I had the ability. When I looked around, I visually saw people as beautiful, their voices and movements as inspirational. In art museums, I searched for advice in the work of the great artists of the past. I tried to correctly guess how the art masters tempered their moods during work, how they viewed their surrounding world and successfully conveyed all this into the actual creation of their masterpieces.

Meditation came natural to me before these great art pieces and also came simply in a walk on the Leningrad and Moscow streets. For me, it was a light, euphoric state, observing in admiration “a random picture of life.” During this time, I made numerous drawings copying Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and others. Copying precisely to the original and then repeating in free exercise drawings, I was attempting to understand their hand movements co-joined with their feelings.

In support of the artist’s method of the necessity for heightened happiness when creating art, the English painter John Constable wrote he wished to paint such a painting in which “the mind of the viewer would have the pleasure to travel in.” In the painting, they would have the pleasure of going into the fields and forests, and follow the plants and rubble roads. His countryman, Thomas Gainsborough, saw and painted very emotional and attractive human portrait figures, and that was his silent advice for me.

In immortal pieces of literature, I saw a similar process of emotional uplifting in the creation of an enchanting atmosphere. This was evident in the countless great legends and fairytales, say, from folklore or written by Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Le Fontaine, A. Pushkin, M. Lermontov, and in the works by great writers like Dickens and Hugo. In Shakespeare’s enchanted theater (or any other theater’s mystical affairs), I believe that many people feel a magical feeling of being in a special world. Seeing the great landscapes of Dutch painters, the wonderful opera music of Donizetti, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, all were teaching me how critically important it is for great art to lift the spirits with a festive atmosphere. It may be too much to say, but yet for many, and me as well, it was a “taste of paradise” or a glimpse into a better world.

In Leningrad’s Academy of Fine Art, where I attended art school, there was a remarkable museum consisting of a room that was built as a circle around the inner courtyard. The museum was filled with magnificent plaster copies of famous sculptures from around the world, Egyptian through Greek and Roman eras to Medieval times. During lunchtime, I made a habit to take a daily silent tour to become familiar with these sculptures. The sculptures explained themselves to me without words. Their science taught me noble artistic principles, and how these principles adapted to the different times by taking different forms. My rules of art continued to develop also in Moscow at the Pushkin Museum of Art, with exploring their significant collection of plaster cast world sculpture.

While walking along the streets and many bridges of Leningrad, there struck an association to me of the same beauty as the very bridges depicted in Hokusai’s engravings or in Canaletto’s paintings. I also saw the streets depicted with love in a Dutch landscape. It taught me to appreciate my own streets. I came to appreciate the fascinating world of the Impressionists. Claude Monet’s happiness impressed me, his marvelous beauty of open nature, in the atmosphere of fields and flowers. The same delightful feeling was consciously created by Renoir. Pissarro’s Paris city scenes were very influential to me as well. Seurat’s giant A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, is not only an exquisite painting, but a celebration of happiness. These artists reminded and taught me about an uplifted spiritual state and a noble turn of mind. What is considered beautiful today? The principles of Greek or Roman standards of beauty in art now share space with many other standards of what can be considered “classic” beauty. The grasp of our perception of beauty has been extremely extended. Even children’s scribbles today may be justly recognized as having classical and beautiful quality, if attuned with natural simplicity. Prehistoric art is considered valuable and beautiful, and it really is. They’re done with the same set of rules, but as appropriate in its time. The same can be said about the entire amazing cultural treasury seen in the art of the early civilizations of Africa, Asia and the Americas.

People have natural affinity with the laws of nature, as demonstrated even in a simple scratched line or in a lump of clay (as, in our time, in the sculptures of De Kooning and Miro, or seen in the cave paintings of prehistoric times, or in Cy Twombly’s brilliant spontaneous child-like scribbles) which indeed, despite its apparent simplicity, abide by unwritten laws of art and are therefore beautiful.

The rocky road of many great artists’ lives (like Beethoven, Van Gogh, Rothko or Pollock) may often appear as perpetual suffering, because of their defenseless optimism before life’s harsher aspects. The sunny side which they would like to project in their art still speaks that, when looking from afar and detaching from one’s suffering, life is harmonious and perfect; and, regardless of its sadnesses, everyday life is a living masterpiece of art that seems sculpted, painted, lighted, composed, far better than any art creation made by human hand. Artists just follow the beauty and happiness what already exists in nature. If someone should argue that there are a lot of ugly things in life, there are; but there are millions of great people, besides great artists, who strive in their own professions to make this world a happy place to live in. To me, as an artist, the hum of the city, mixed with its city voices, is music of the highest emotional quality. When people move on the street, they come together and separate and combine as in a most magnificent eternal ballet.

Alexander Ney

Human Heads and Abstract Holes: Alexander Ney’s Ceramic Sculptures

By Donald Kuspit

Holes, an abundance of holes, in a seemingly infinite variety of configurations, all rhythmically embedded in the surface of Alexander Ney’s ceramic heads, like so many geometrical punctuation marks forming a cryptic script, a sort of esoteric Morse code: such endlessly proliferating geometrical signs are Ney’s signature gesture, as it were--a very distinctive, not to say startling, assertion of artistic identity, indeed, artistic uniqueness. What do they mean? Are they a sort of babel, on the borderline between the verbal and the visual, or do they communicate something unexpected, which is why they take unexpected form? The message they encode is not easy to translate into ordinary language, perhaps because it is not ordinary.

Ney tells us that they were inspired by Henry Moore’s use of the hole to incorporate actual negative space into the sculptural fantasy of the human body. Ney could have also referred to Lucio Fontana’s use of holes to perforate the picture plane of the canvas--another modernist precedent. But their placement of the holes is much more haphazard than Ney’s, and much more destructive. And, unlike Ney’s holes, theirs are far from geometrically perfect. Moore’s holes seem to have been made by an ccentrically shaped cannonball; many penetrate the figure completely, as though demonstrating that it is not as solid as it looks. Moore’s Reclining Figure, 1939 is so punctured with holes it seems hollow. Fontana’s holes are even more disruptive and ragged: they lacerate the painted surface beyond repair. They deliberately violate it, subverting the possibility of illusory space--the closed self-contained space of the picture--with the reality of the hole’s open space. Fontana’s Spatial Concept: The End of God, 1963 makes the point clearly: the holes puncture the illusion of God, reducing it to a hollow myth.

Contrast these works, which seem fascinated with the emptiness of being--obsessed with the abyss that underlies it--with the fullness of being of Ney’s expressive heads, from the Poet and Hero, both 1987 through Mountain Man and New Scientist, both 1993 to Dream and Sister, 2004. Whether the holes completely or incompletely cover the surface--in Empress, 1990, Cherry, and Promise, both 1991 they ‘decoratively’ define certain features, especially the elaborate coiffures of the females, rather than engulf the heads (as though in a horror vacui)--they affirm its thickness.

Paradoxically, the ‘absence’ the holes ‘embody’ adds to the head’s presence and
tangibility--indeed, enlivens it and enhances its dignity. Ney’s holes are much more optimistic than those of Moore and Fontana, for they exalt rather than detract from being. The holes of Moore and Fontana are catastrophes, while Ney’s holes recreate the heads--never completely subverting them, the holes suggest that however vulnerable they remain enigmatic--in what at first seems like an attempt to decreate them, that is, reduce them to the mortal clay of which they are made.

The holes give the heads visionary immediacy: they are of this world--heads are after all familiar forms (Ney once said he had no wish to be ‘outlandish’ but rather ‘to be in contact’ with everyday reality)—but the holes give them a peculiarly otherworldly aura. On the surface they are everyday, but their surface is punctured with holes that show they are far from everyday, even estranged from everydayness. I want to suggest that Ney’s holes express an altered state of consciousness.

They certainly alter the state of the heads--uncannily transform them, if not beyond everyday recognition. At the least, the holes complicate our perception of the heads. The configurations of holes represent configurations of consciousness - a ‘higher’ consciousness ecstatically aware of a far from everyday reality (and as such at odds with the everyday consciousness represented by the familiar head). It may seem strange to say so, but the holes arise from inside the head--they emanate from the mind, as it were (sited in the head)--even as they are ‘imposed’ from the outside. They may not emanate with the force of Moses’ so-called ‘horns of light’, but they are also signs of creative thought. Ney’s holes are a way of getting inside the head in order to articulate the intense creative activity occurring there.

Certainly Musician and Poet, both 1992 and New Scientist, 1993 are creative types--extraordinary people with original, inspired consciousness. From the beginning, as King David’s Harp, 1958 indicates, Ney represented individuals in an inspired state of mind--or rather represented that inspired state of mind. Even death can be an inspiration, and may even be an inspired state of being, as Ney’s extraordinary Metaphysical Skull, 1977 suggest. Does the symmetrical pattern of holes signify eternity—axiomatic geometry is as close to eternity as it is possible to come on earth, as has been said--suggesting the possibility of resurrection? Light seems to dwell in Ney’s skulls--they are not simply white, but luminously white. The geometrical holes let in the light even as they show the light within, giving the skull mystic import. In short, however everyday they look—and do Ney’s heads look so everyday? (many have a primitivist /mannerist cast, as their elongation indicates)--they are archetypes of creative humanity. Or, if one wishes, they are allegorical figures symbolizing the range of human possibilities, from hero to artist. (Artist as hero?) The rows of holes are in effect objectified streams of creative or originary consciousness.

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in Ney’s Self-Portrait, 1988, where any semblance of everyday roundedness disappears in the flatness of the abstract ‘image’--although the head’s roundedness remains in the off-roundness of the sculpture--which is a compound of compulsively and convulsively repeated abstract patterns. The holes line up in eccentrically concentric circles. Their asymmetrical swirling--all the more intense because their movement seems simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal--suggests a kind of creative vertigo. Or is it creative vigor? This self-portrait, which I think is remarkable in the history of artists’ self-portraiture, suggests the intensity of Ney’s inner life. Technically the holes are an extension of stippling, and their linear organization is reminiscent of hatching, but symbolically their movement represents Ney’s creative consciousness. They three-dimensionalize the two-dimensional surface, giving it evocative depth. They are literalist modernist/formalist devices that paradoxically represent what can never be literalized let alone reified into perfect form. (Dividing the head into separate areas is a familiar way of mapping and representing the different zones of brain activity. Are Ney’s undulating hyperactive patterns externalized brain waves?)

All of this suggests that the holes are peculiarly musical in import. (Think of their association with King David’s Harp.) In conversation, Ney calls his holes ‘humming,’ making it clear that they are a kind of music. Indeed, they might be understood as a kind of visual serial music, as their rhythmic repetitiveness suggests. Ney gives us intricate musical sculptures, just as his countryman Kandinsky gave us intricate musical paintings. The musical metaphor for painting can be traced back to Walter Pater, who famously said that all the arts aspire to the condition of music--music is formal and expressive at once, with no need for representation to reconcile what seem like opposites (the point of Kandinsky’s non-objectivity)--and forward to Clement Greenberg, who refined the musical metaphor into a theory of ‘all-over, polyphonic’ painting, as he famously called it. The idea was to make art as esthetically pure yet as humanly moving as music.

What Ney does is carry the musical idea of art into sculpture with unprecedented directness. Indeed, he has compared the ‘hole, the absence of form,’ with ‘silence, the basis of music,’ suggesting that his holes are ’the basis of [sculptural] form’ the way silence is the basis of musical form. The elegant all-overness of Ney’s holes turns his sculptural representations of the human head into polyphonic music. The holes are so many musical notes ingeniously organized to arouse even subtler feelings than Kandinsky’s musical compositions.

Kandinsky abandoned representation; Ney never does, however abstract his
holes are. One might say that the holes symbolize his avant-garde iconoclasm; the familiar intelligibility of his heads suggests his traditionalism. Or, to use Wilhelm Worringer’s distinction, the heads show his deep empathy for the human condition, the holes convey his powerful will to abstraction. It is their fusion that gives his works their transcendental poignancy. His frequent combination of square and circle in a single abstract pattern makes the point clearly: Jung remarks that ‘the circle signifies the roundness of heaven and the all-embracing nature of the Opneumatic deity, ‘the square refers to the earth (1). Perhaps nowhere is Ney’s determination to unite the opposites of circle and square more evident than in Heroic, 1976, Instructor, 1981, and Meditation, 1986, among other Cubist inspired yet bizarrely Expressionist works. The Cubist Expressionism, as it may be called--or is it Expressionist Cubism?--of these works is the clearest example of Ney’s ability to encompass the extremes in a seamless synthesis.

But there is another reason for Ney’s conjoining of abstract pattern and representational head while maintaining their difference. (It is a conjunction that occurs in antiquity--just as Ney’s abstract patterns do--with the difference that the geometric patterns often frame the organic figure rather than become part of it.) It has as much to do with Ney’s fascination with his medium as with his wish to remain ‘relate[d] to my [human] environment’. Clay is an inherently plastic material, and Ney wants to demonstrate the extent of its plasticity. On the one hand it can be molded into a seemingly infinite variety of forms; on the other hand it is an impressionable’ material, lending itself to the imprint of determinate shapes--like Ney’s geometry. (Implying immortality, as noted, while clay is a proverbial symbol of mortality.) Clay is also an elemental material with an ancient meaning: God made man out of clay (primal earth), suggesting its organic potential. We find this notion in ancient mythology—Prometheus sculpted man out of clay (suggesting that the sculptor is a god, that is, he gives the formless form, makes the indeterminate determinate)--as well as in the Old Testament. Clay, then, is an originary, magical material rich with artistic and human import.

The traditional sculptor gave organic shape to inorganic matter, utilizing the expressive potential of malleable clay to model his forms--Rodin is a climactic example--while the modern sculptor attempted to disclose the plasticity implicit in static objects, as Boccioni did in his Development of a Bottle in Space, 1912. Both understood that clay was a supremely flexible material, which is why it could be used to convey every nuance of a dynamic shape. I think Ney is both traditional and modern: punching hard geometrical holes in soft impressionable clay is one way of making its plasticity clear, and shaping it to form expressive human heads is another. The former makes its innate plasticity self-evident. The latter suggests that there can be no creativity without clay-like flexibility. Clay¹s plasticity symbolizes creative freedom and spontaneity, even as the human forms into which it is shaped seem fated. Ney¹s interlocking patterns of holes--regular, but eccentrically or irregularly related--reflects the paradoxical character of the clay in which they are embedded. The patterns also seem fated, for they are unique creative designs that are nonetheless universal, as their relentless repetitiveness suggests.

It must take great energy and determination--not to say creative boldness--to put so many holes into a clay head after carefully modeling it. Can one say that Ney has an unconscious wish to destroy the head after making it, as though to suggest that it is impossible to sculpt a perfect head? The holes certainly put intense pressure on its form. The heads thrust into space, sometimes with headlong force (some resemble the apotropiac figureheads mounted on the prows of traditional ships); the holes press inward, as though to upstage the intense expressivity of the heads with their own dynamic, more mysterious expressivity. Something has to give--but nothing does. There is a sense of great concentration rather than impending disintegration. Heads and holes surprisingly integrate. The holes are as subtly placed and differentiated as the head is subtly modeled and individualized. They are an abstract expressive supplement that seems to dramatize its individuality. Ney’s holes are not nihilistic, like those of Moore and Fontana. Ney’s patterns are a dance of life not death. They convey joie de vivre rather than indiscriminate nothingness. Ney’s holes create into the human object in an apperception of its aliveness, to use the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s idea, pointing to the fact that all creativity is relational, that is, there is no creation ex nihilo. Indeed, without their configurations of holes, Ney’s heads would be less plastically alive and intimate, however intensely alive and engaging they obviously are.

Notes: (1)C. G. Jung, Answer to Job (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 85