For the press
ANYA ZHOLUD
Inhale Exhale
Curators: Anna Zaitseva, Maria Lavrova
Work with the Anna Zholud Archive: Yulia Tikhomirova
Co-Organisers: PA Gallery, ROSIZO State Museum and Exhibition Centre
The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents ‘Inhale, Exhale’, an exhibition of work by Anya Zholud.
It is difficult to imagine Russian art of the first quarter of the 21st century without the work of Anya Zholud, one of the most prominent artists on the Russian art scene for the last 20 years. In 2007, at the age of 26, she was already nominated for the Innovation State Prize in the field of contemporary art, and in 2008 for the Kandinsky Prize. Zholud’s first solo museum exhibition was held in 2009 at the State Russian Museum. That same year she became one of the few Russian artists participating in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art. Her works feature in the collections of leading Russian museums: the Hermitage; the State Russian Museum; the State Tretyakov Gallery; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA); the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (MAMM); and ROSIZO, among others. Anya Zholud passed away on 4 June 2025, at the age of 43.
Paintings and installations by Anya Zholud are immediately recognisable. The artist visualised the contours of the surrounding material and natural world using an unexpected and seemingly not at all ‘feminine’ material: metal rods. Brought into three-dimensional space, the contours organise space in a unique way, emphasising the emptiness that structures volume, just as the invisible soul organises the visible body.
With her brutal iron rods Zholud created a metaphor for the invisible connections that envelop our world and link everyone together. The ‘Communications’ project was presented at the 53rd Venice Biennale: metal wires, like arteries, connected two points, the entrance and exit, thereby embodying the process of life, the vicissitudes between beginning and end.
Anya Zholud returned to this theme shortly before her death. Her exhibition ‘Paragraph’, about the breakdown of connections, opened at the PA Gallery in 2025.
A key part of Anya Zholud’s oeuvre is her small ‘pictures’, where laconic words written in childlike handwriting appear in white on a grey background: ‘entrance’, ‘exit’, ‘inhale’, ‘exhale’... These text-based works by Zholud are a living diary, deeply sincere and poignant. She writes short, existential phrases on the borderline between everyday life and the philosophy of existence in a flexible, wiry script: ‘I didn’t change the tap’, ‘cold, fear’, ‘everything divides into the living and dead’, ‘I can’t fetch the water myself’ – her paintings convey the hollow rattle of tin. Zholud’s works are biographical, with phrases and images taken from the context of the artist’s life, yet they touch a universal nerve that allows every viewer to feel a connection.
The textual paintings belong to the series ‘HALF THE TROUBLE, or Illusion of the Routine’ and ‘After the Winter’. The serial nature of Zholud’s paintings is fundamental: she often transformed the act of painting into an action, focusing on the process of creating a vast number of paintings of the same type. These series became the basis for so-called ‘actions’, during which the artist either sold her works for a pittance or gave them away. One of these actions was entitled ‘I’ll Give into Good Hands’ – a common phrase when people are forced to part with a beloved pet. Thanks to these art actions Anya Zholud’s works reached a large number of people who became involved with her art.
Obsessive repetition of the same images, whether it was a can featured forty-one times or a kettle appearing sixty times, became a pretext for the artist to explore the actual process of painting. Anya Zholud meticulously described her feelings while creating the series, reflecting on her changing relationship with each subject: a can, a kettle or clove of garlic, and her original texts can be read as part of the exhibition.
The Anya Zholud exhibition at MAMM is a unique summary of the artist’s oeuvre, not claiming to be exhaustive, but including most of her seminal, conceptually significant works.
MAMM thanks the following for providing exhibits:
State Tretyakov Gallery and personally the General Director Elena Pronicheva,
ROSIZO State Museum and Exhibition Centre and personally the General Director Ivan Lykoshin,
Moscow Museum of Modern Art and personally the Director Vasily Tsereteli,
PA Gallery and personally Elena Parshina, Nadezhda Avanesova and Alexander Balandin,
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow and personally the Director Daria Kotova,
Sinara Foundation for the Support and Implementation of Cultural Initiatives and personally the Director Natalia Levitskaya,
Ekaterina Foundation and personally the Directors Ekaterina and Vladimir Seminikhin,
Andrey Cheglakov Foundation and personally the Director Andrey Cheglakov,
Gridchinhall Gallery and personally the Directors Svetlana and Sergey Gridchin,
Limonov Art Foundation and personally the Director Sergey Limonov,
Aksenov Family Foundation and personally Dmitry Aksenov,
Sergey Alexandrov, Anton Belov, Maxim Boxer, Irina Volskaya, Mikhail Gurevich and Oksana Polyakova, Paruyr Davtyan, Anna Zaitseva, Praskovya Klimova, Anton Kozlov, Kristina Kolyakina, Mikhail Koryagin, Igor Markin, Vera Nigmatullina, Olga Slutsker, Daria Surovtseva, Igor Sukhanov, Sofia Trotsenko, Ekaterina Finogenova, Denis Khimilyayne, Dmitry Shokhin, and other private collectors.
We would like to thank the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow for the opportunity to work with the archive.
