The International Foundation of Russian and Eastern European Art is dedicated to preserving and presenting the art of the postwar Russian and Eastern-European tradition — above all the unofficial and contemporary artists who worked outside, and often against, the doctrine of Socialist Realism.
What the collection holds
The foundation’s collection centres on the generation that defined Soviet unofficial art and its aftermath: the Sots Art movement that turned state iconography into satire; the Lianozovo circle and the wider nonconformist scene; the Moscow conceptualists; and the figurative painters, sculptors, printmakers and photographers who carried this tradition into contemporary practice. Named artists in the collection include Komar & Melamid, Vladimir Nemukhin, Natalia Nesterova, Alexander Kosolapov, Leonid Sokov, Boris Orlov, Grisha Bruskin, Oleg Vassiliev, Dmitri Plavinsky, Ivan Chuikov and others, each presented in a dedicated profile.
Purpose
The foundation exists to keep this body of work visible — to document the artists, their movements and their place in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, and to serve as a reference for museums, researchers, collectors and the public internationally.