AZ/ART Centre for Contemporary Art opens "The Wrong Horizon", an exhibition of Anya Zheludь timed to the exact anniversary of the artist's death

The AZ/ART Centre for Contemporary Art has opened "The Wrong Horizon", an exhibition of Anya Zhelud, assembled to coincide exactly with the anniversary of the artist's death. Paintings, objects and installations spanning twenty-five years, among them early works of 2000-2001 that the public has not seen before. The curator is Irina Gorlova; the core of the display is the collection of the AZ Museum and the collection of Sergey Alexandrov, who was one of the first to discern her painting and supported the artist for years. The show runs until 23 August.

Zhelud died on 4 June 2025, aged forty-three. As an artist she managed to achieve both renown and recognition: the main project of the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, "New Decor" at Garage, "Gates and Doors" at the Russian Museum, nominations for and awards of the Innovation Prize and the Kandinsky Prize. Her works are in the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery, the Hermitage, the Russian Museum and MMOMA. Zhelud became famous for sculptures and installations made of metal rod, chipboard and concrete: contour objects in which a thing is reduced to a drawing of itself, to a line tracing an emptiness.

She spent her last years almost as a recluse in a village outside Moscow, not leaving her studio for months at a time and making a hundred works a year. Perhaps in this period her institutional visibility faded somewhat, but it was also a very productive one.

Anya Zhelud's last project in her lifetime was the exhibition at PA Gallery, which opened less than two weeks before her death. In the year after her death her works were shown at MAMM, where the retrospective "Inhale-Exhale" was assembled, named after a painting of 2022 from Elektroizolyator, outside Moscow. Now, on the anniversary, AZ/ART introduces viewers to another side of her work, showing the painting with which she began in the 2000s. It is especially valuable that "The Wrong Horizon" presents a portrait of Zhelud from before she became "the artist of the metal rod".