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# Today we talk to the art historian Sergey Popov, founder of the pop/off/art gallery, about how the gallery works with artists' legacies
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/segodnia-v-rubrike-beseda-my-pogovorim-s-iskusstvovedom-osnovatelem-galerei-pop-off-art-sergeem-popovym-o-tom-kak-galereia-rabotaet-s-naslediem-khudozhnikov/
- Published: 2025-04-22T13:04:14.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:30:28.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Interviews, Art, Heritage

*On heirs*

Working with the heirs of contemporary artists continues, to some extent, the tasks set by the artist himself: sales to the very best collections, large museum exhibitions and catalogues, including catalogues raisonnés. Significant artists, as a rule, achieve all this in their lifetime. Yet it happens that someone has sufficient sales but no museum exhibitions, or has catalogues in abundance but, for some reason, scarcely any market. The causes may vary. What matters is that the heirs act, on the whole, consistently and sensibly, neither "locking up" the artist's market nor squandering the asset. We discuss the tasks of promoting the artist's legacy together, but it also happens that the heirs take promotion upon themselves, while the gallery handles sales and related matters.

*On legacy*

The discussion of the fate of legacies is one of the micro-dramas in the broad panorama of the change of generations. Those who established themselves as artists in the Soviet Union became maestros with the years, and some, at last, "classics"; but, one way or another, closer to the present day most of the art of the departed era has turned into legacies with which something must be done. Today the consensus has taken fairly clear shape: a roster of names has been built, mostly from the unofficial art scene, in which any work costs a very serious sum. These are, above all, such artists as Ilya Kabakov, Ivan Chuikov, Oleg Tselkov, Vladimir Yankilevsky and Mikhail Schwartzman. We worked with Yankilevsky until 2009, and we remember how difficult it was then to plot the trajectory of his promotion and his market.

*On names*

We are now continuing to work with the legacies of several artists whom we represented in the last years or decades of their lives: Nikolai Kasatkin, Alexander Pankin, Andrei Grositsky and Mikhail Roginsky. Today their art is unquestionable classic, their works are included in dozens of museum collections, and leading collectors hunt them down.

*On Yury Zlotnikov*

A special case is the legacy of Yury Savelyevich Zlotnikov, a great artist and one of the creators of the language of non-objective art in the Soviet Union. By the 1990s he was regarded as one of the classics of contemporary art, but he categorically refused to "surrender" to the market. I had many conversations with him on the subject, but persuading him was futile. Zlotnikov insisted that museum purchases were enough: the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum were already acquiring his key works. It turned out, however, that in his last years he had been preparing his grandchildren to take care of his legacy. The gallery signed an agreement with them a year after Yury Savelyevich's death, and since then we have made enormous efforts to remedy the earlier scarcity of his works on the market, and to achieve high sales results and a presence in the top collections, not only in Russia.

*On Kupriyanov*

Another unusual case is the legacy of Vladimir Kupriyanov, one of the authoritative artists working with photography and one of the founders of the Rodchenko School. Photography is always a question of edition size and authentic printing, and in Kupriyanov's case often also of the creation of a photo-sculpture, a unique object. After the artist's death his heirs did not immediately agree on how to cooperate. Until they did, it was impossible to observe copyright, which is indivisible. In effect, his works could be neither exhibited nor sold. In Kupriyanov's case there is something worth fighting for: his best-known work, "Cast Me Not Away from Thy Face", became the most expensive photograph in Russian contemporary art and held the record for all Russian twentieth-century photography: $142,093.

*On the gallery's work*

For each of the artists there is an understanding of how exactly to promote his legacy, in which museums it should be shown, to which collectors works should be offered, and which catalogues to prepare for publication. Our main task is that an artist who is no longer with us should be perceived through his works as if he were alive and continued to exert an intense influence on current processes in art.

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