IPEL Cultural event Art & Politics 

Private Visit of the exhibition Art and Utopia in the Land of the Soviets at the Grand Palais with its Cutator Nicolas Liucci Gotnika

Introduction and Presentation Nicolas Liucci-Gotniko  Curator of the Exhibition 'RED'

Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov is a curator at Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne in Paris. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy of art with a specialization in analytical aesthetics. He authored numerous essays dedicated to modern and contemporary art on such topics, as Fluxus, Jeff Koons, Tino Sehgal among others. In charge of the scientific coordination of the museum, he curated several exhibitions, among which “Reframing Modernism” at the National Gallery Singapore (2016) and “KOLLEKTSIA! Art contemporain en URSS et en Russie 1950-2000” (2016).

The October revolution of 1917 led to an upheaval in the social order, the repercussions of which proved decisive in terms of artistic creativity. Many artists were committed to the communist cause and wanted to participate in the construction of the new society through their works. Led for the most part by genuine convictions, as with Mayakovsky, these artists held opposing ideas on what the art of socialism should be. From the end of the 1920s, such debates were silenced by the Stalinist regime. This led to the gradual establishment of socialist realism, an aesthetic doctrine that came to govern all areas of creativity. Such debates were followed closely in capitalist countries: many artistic exchanges were established with the young Soviet Russia, which attracted intellectuals and artists curious to discover the «fatherland of socialism». It is this story, with its tensions and its ups and downs, that the exhibition relates through a series of important works on loan from the major Russian museums and the Centre Pompidou; a history where material innovations and ideological constraints, inextricably linked, raise the question of a possible politicization of the arts.

Following the exhibition, we invite you to a glass de champagne with the curator in the delightful restaurant across the Grand Palais overlooking the Champs-Elysées gardens The Marigny Restaurant.