Moscow Museum of Modern Art and RuArts Foundation for Promotion of Contemporary Art present the first retrospective show of Vita Buivid, a bright and original artist, who combines photography, painting and collage in her works. The project occupies five floors of the venue and contains projects, created by the author from the early 1990s till the present time.

It is the first time when the oeuvre of Vita Buivid is presented in such a full. The exhibition comprises such celebrated series as How I Spent My Summer, nominated to the Kandinsky Prize 2009, Pionomania, Love Me As I Love You, Inquisition, Nevsky Prospect, Men in the Bath, Prime Time, Pelts of the Bobrovs Family, For Comfort, Artek and others.

Vita Buivid can boast of vast and interesting geography, which includes her work in New York and Paris. But the key periods are associated with St-Petersburg and Moscow, where the artist works and lives from 1998 till the present time. The imagery and aesthetics of these cities are paradoxically combined, either flowing from some series to another, or conflicting sometimes. The St-Petersburg series are penetrated with cold and alienation of the classical style, together with the post-Soviet Bohemian style. At the same time the Moscow series are full of Baroque saturation, tend to the conceptual understanding of gloss and kitsch.

The works by Vita Buivid can be attributed to the photo-based art. But every time the artist manages to expand the borders of the genre. In her artworks the aesthetics is united with the expressive and unfinished «democratic» photography. But this form is filled with deep content of different levels of perception. Each series by Buivid is a social and cultural narrative, revealing details of the bohemian lifestyle, family conflicts, personal experiences, which turns into a large-scale research, able to move the audience from the emotional experience to existential. Buivid is often referred to the feminists. It is rather untrue, as her interests can hardly be exhausted in such an unambiguous definition. Nevertheless, the collision of the male and female views is typical for the artist’s oeuvre. It alternately takes either the ironic or the dramatic shade. The recent projects become a reflection of the time, warning or responding to different historical and political events in the country. The author’s creative evolution can be seen in more than 30 projects. Viewers can notice the analysis of human manifestations in fullness and ambiguity in each of them.

Vita Buivid was born in Dnepropetrovsk. She has been occupied with photography from the late 1980s. In 1994, the artist received a grant from the Circ Bureau of Russian Culture in Amsterdam and worked on the project about the influence of Dutch art on Russian culture. Thanks to a grant from the Rutgers University she went to New York City and became interested in fashion photography. After her return to Russia, she spent some time working with fashion magazines. In 2000, she worked in Paris on the project titled «Paris. Red» at the invitation of the City Hall.