Alexander Roitburd: Requiem for Metternich

objet trouvé assemblage, performance
granary
Plasy Monastery 1997

Alexander Roitburd (born 1961 in Odessa) graduated from Odessa Pedagogical University, the Department of Fine Arts, in 1983. Roitburd is known for his paintings, installations, video, and performance art. He has been very active in the artistic community as an art critic, art curator, 
publicist, communicator and intellectual who greatly contributed to the establishment of post-Soviet contemporary art trends in Odessa, Kiev and Moscow. The artist was one of the founders of the Ukrainian trans-avant-garde of the 1980s. 

In 1999, Roitburd produced a video inspired by Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin. The video was bought by MoMA, New York. In 2001, the video project by Roitburd was part of the Italian Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale. From 2000, Roitburd lived and worked in New York. The artist returned to Ukraine in 2002 to become the director of Marat Guelman Gallery in Kiev.

For the last seven years, Roitburd has primarily been producing large-format, narrative and figurative paintings that bear a strong sense of political irony, mythological allusion and philosophical and humanitarian discourse. Works by Roitburd were exhibited in New York by the White Box Gallery at the "New Ukrainian Painting" show in 2008.