Untitled

Nikiforov, like many of his generation, took a critical dissident position in relation to the emerging artistic-capitalist institutions, the values ​​they broadcast, and the power relations they imposed. The institutional field reciprocated: Yuri Nikiforov became an inconvenient artist. He was not interested in the interior-commercial functioning of his works, the aesthetics did not fit the changing tastes of the new bourgeois class, he was in no hurry to learn the affected newspeak in which Russian contemporary art was then explained, nor was he in a hurry to recognize the new cultural hierarchies and carve out a place for himself in them. Nikiforov's behavioral pattern corresponded even less to the attitudes of the era. Strict, prickly, abrupt, demanding from himself and his interlocutor a conversation on the merits, intolerant of self-marketing and new secular rituals, he looked like an "old-timer" and "out of place" against the backdrop of colorful, noisy, sparkling-bubbling art holidays. Nikiforov's art fell out of the professional gallery and exhibition rotation for a long time. Now, when the project of business integration into the international system of contemporary art has been buried without honors, and competitiveness and marginality have ceased to be a measure of cultural value, the time has come for serious institutions to do archival work, diligently patch up holes in the modern history of art and painstakingly collect names and phenomena that did not fit into the Procrustean bed of the domestic art market, bent their line and developed their own strategies of existence, meanings and values. The name of Yuri Nikiforov is one of them.

Text: Alexander Dashevsky