Dmitri Prigov exhibition to open at Calvert 22 Space on Thursday 12 October

Calvert 22 Foundation’s new exhibition Dmitri Prigov. Theatre of Revolutionary Action will open on Thursday 12 October and is set to give visitors a rare insight into one of Russia’s most prolific artists, who was briefly incarcerated in a lunatic asylum by the Soviet authorities.

The exhibition, in partnership with the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, the Hermitage Foundation UK and the Dmitri Prigov Foundation, will have a private view at 6:00pm on Thursday at Calvert 22 Space in London. It is open to the public from 13 October to 17 December.

Dmitri Prigov. Theatre of Revolutionary Action is the first posthumous solo exhibition in the UK dedicated to Prigov, a sculptor by training who later created poetry, graphic art, installations, performance art, film, TV and music. He was one of the leading lights of the non-conformist art movements that emerged in Russia in the 1970s.

The exhibition will use performativity as a way of understanding Prigov’s works and the ironic, mystical world they evoke. It has been realised in collaboration with Prigov’s son, Andrei Prigov, and will include a number of the artist’s early typewritten concrete poems, video performances and rarely seen objects and drawings from the Prigov Foundation’s collection.

Much of the work on display dates from after the fall of Communism, when Prigov was free to publish and exhibit in his homeland. In this period, we see him gradually coming to terms with the collapse of the Soviet system against which he had struggled for most of his adult life. Prigov died of a heart attack in Moscow in 2007 aged 67.

If you would like to attend the opening for free, please click here to RSVP.