Seeing Mikhail Chernyshov's work in the flesh for the first time, at his retrospective at the Alina Pinsky Gallery

I saw Mikhail Chernyshov's work in the flesh for the first time at his retrospective at the Alina Pinsky Gallery. The artist, who is represented in the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery and many major museums around the world, has worked in geometric abstraction since 1959, left the USSR in 1980 and has lived in America ever since. Not the best-known name among Russian artists, and unjustly so: this is very good abstraction. Chernyshov wrote that nine tenths of his works had, in their day, simply to be destroyed, since there was nowhere to keep them. He painted on plywood, hardboard, sheets of tin and all manner of road signs, so they took up a fair amount of room. The prices, of course, are now substantial: in principle that is what a Kabakov might fetch, though this is, after all, a slightly different echelon. Even so, the exhibition is interesting and the author's biography has some spark to it. I recommend reading his memoirs, in which he lays into his contemporaries in salty language and speaks rather sharply of various genres, and also shares curious details of the life of the "non-conformist" artists in the USSR in the 1950s to 1970s