Untitled

Nikiforov, like many in his generation, took a critical dissident position towards the emerging artistic capitalist institutions, the values they conveyed, and the power relations they imposed. The institutional field responded in kind: Yuri Nikiforov became an inconvenient artist.  He was not interested in the interior and commercial functioning of his works, aesthetics did not fall into the changing tastes of the new bourgeois class, he was in no hurry to learn the simpering newspeak, which then explained Russian contemporary, to recognize the new cultural hierarchies and to carve out a place for himself in them too. Nikiforov's behavioral pattern was even less consistent with the attitudes of the era. Strict, brash, harsh, demanding a substantive conversation from himself and the interlocutor, intolerant of self-marketing and new secular rituals, he looked "old-fashioned" and "unwritten" against the background of colorful, noisy, bubbly-bubbling art festivals. Nikiforov's art has been out of the professional gallery and exhibition rotation for a long time. Now that 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, it is time for serious institutions to archive work, diligently plug 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 They developed their own line and developed their own strategies of existence, meanings and values. The name of Yuri Nikiforov is one of those.

Text: Alexander Dashevsky