CONTEMPORARIES

Sculptor, USA

I consider Vadim Grinberg to be one of the most interesting artists from Russia.

Grinberg’s work is powerful, showing exceptional artistic ability.

I am especially impressed by his sculptural objects made of leather which demonstrate a deep philosophical resonance. He has great focus, drive, and ambition, and can contribute a great deal to the contemporary art scene.

Director, UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, Art and Cultural Center, USA

I first met Vadim Grinberg with a group of his art-making peers in a commune-like setting in Moscow in 1988. This was just at the moment when so-called “unofficial” artists in Russia, those whose art choices were directed by themselves rather than the state, were gaining more attention in the West. I remember that there was great camaraderie and energy within the group as they looked toward a future of greater freedom and exposure.

His earliest mature work relied heavily on found materials since art supplies were rare in the USSR, especially for an “unofficial” artist. Leather scraps liberated from the waste bins of Odessa and Moscow factories became his medium of choice, reworked and manipulated into wonderfully detailed images of books and soaring bird’s wings symbolizing thoughts of freedom and the undaunted inner spirit.

As art materials became more readily available, he began to produce large scale two dimensional works on steel. More recently he has used silver and gold anodized aluminum, often abrading the surface to allow it to capture and shatter light. He has left none of these materials behind but instead seems to reinvent them over and over.

Art Critic, Editor, USA

What is significant about the several artists who are Vadim Grinberg is not that they are different from one another, or that we might be able to discern an inviolable sensibility between them, but that all of them do intriguing things and do them well. The sensibility animating Grinberg’s multiple artistic personalities is not one of sculpture or irony, it is one of energy and craft, a combination of effervescent, even witty perception and careful execution. However many styles Grinberg practices, however many ideas he investigates, he involves himself in each and every one with equal verve and skill.

At the same time, we find in all three of Grinberg’s styles that artwork does cohere around the presence of an image, a single, unified, even iconic image that does not serve as the artwork’s reason for being so much as it serves as a sub- or superstructure for formulating objects. Material and texture impel Grinberg, and he could probably create pure sensuous experience, free of reference, out of any of the materials he employs.

Art Critic, Italy

The dream of style inhabits the work of Vadim Grinberg, crossed naturally by dynamism which does not mean simple abstraction but also the appeal of essentiality bordering on a complex and modern philosophy.

The idea that inhabits the compositions is undoubtedly born from the rhythm of the modern city, where events overlap incessantly and sensationally. The ornate is a consequence of this dramatization that highlights decorative motifs as signs of dynamism.