Valera & Natasha Cherkashin

Valera Cherkashin (August 23, 1948) and Natasha Cherkashin (April 19, 1958), known as Valera & Natasha Cherkashin, are contemporary artists[1] who have been working as a duo since 1983. They work with photography, create happenings, installations, and video art.

Biographies

Valera Cherkashin was born in Kharkov, Ukraine on August 23, 1948. In 1979, he moved to Leningrad, where he worked and exhibited with the “Sterligov’s Group” -  painters and artists who work and follow the traditions of the Russian avant-garde movement. A year later, Cherkashin moved to Moscow where he became more familiar with contemporary art and artists including Ilya Kabakov. 

Valera met Natasha in the Moscow Metro in 1982. They married a year later. Their initial collaborations focused on images of public spaces and cultural memorials that defined the Soviet era. Photographs and newspapers became the basic materials for their artistic work. and in turn now document historical moments in this period of work entitled “The End of the Epoch.” In one, now famous “happening”, the Cherkashins staged an underground wedding at Moscow’s “Revolutionary Square” metro station where a woman was “married” to one of the three-dimensional soldiers from the 1930s in a traditional ceremony. The Cherkashins like to express their conceptual ideas using traditional forms of visual culture. In their project “The End of the Epoch” they used the traditions of the Russian avant-garde, the form that was born at the junction of the two epochs.

Since 1994, the Cherkashins have traveled a lot and created a number of international projects: “German Atlantis” at Olympia stadium in Berlin in 1996; "Goodbye Favorite European Portraits: hello euro" in the swimming pool of the World Bank Headquarters in Washington D.C. in 1999. Since 2005, the Cherkashins have been working on an international project “Global Underground” which will include art works about metros of 33 countries.

Select personal exhibitions

Collections

Valera & Natasha Cherkashin's work is held in the following permanent public collections:

References

  1. ↑ Andre, Mila (15 December 2002). "Money Matters In Art Exhibit At Bank". Daily News. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  2. ↑ http://www.harrimaninstitute.org/events/exhibits.html
  3. ↑ http://www.galeriebluesquare.com/artist/13/Valera-and-Natasha-Cherkashin
  4. ↑ http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=topics.events&themonth=4&theyear=2008&imageField.x=13&imageField.y=13&topic_id=1424
  5. ↑ http://www.mmoma.ru/exhibitions/special/perehod_moskva_bilbao/
  6. ↑ http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/mwebcgi/Searchall.exe?keyword=cherkashin&xsubmit=%D0%9E%D1%82%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%8C+%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%81
  7. ↑ http://www.mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?coll_keywords=cherkashin
  8. ↑ http://www.mfah.org/search.asp?siteurl=www.mfah.org%2Fhome.asp%3Fpar1%3D1%26par2%3D1%26par3%3D1%26par4%3D1%26par5%3D1%26par6%3D1%26par7%3D%26lgc%3D0%26eid%3D%26currentPage%3D&cx=001222320708958612465%3Adpa4ikzv5wi&cof=FORID%3A11&q=cherkashin#177
  9. ↑ http://www.kolodzeiart.org/Cherkashin.html
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