From January 15 to February 12, 2022 the Galerie Le Minotaure, in its space at 2 rue des Beaux-arts, as well as in the virtual space of the Boutique Le Minotaure, offers an exhibition by Samuel Ackerman (1951), artist from the ‘Ukraine, emigrated to Israel in 1973, and finally to France, to Paris, in 1984, where he lives and works until today.

With other Soviet emigrants of his generation, notably Avraham Ofek and Michail Grobman – also represented by the Galerie Le Minotaure -, he formed in 1975 in Jerusalem, the avant-garde group Leviathan, whose main objective was to create a “Jewish national art”. Contrary to realism – which for the artists of the Leviathan constitutes the negation of a true art – the group develops a stylistics constituting a mixture of contemporary art – conceptual art, happening, land art -, of Jewish culture, of symbolism and orthodox mysticism inspired by icons of Andrei Rublev, characteristics also for the work of Ackerman himself.

After moving to Paris in 1984, he became one of the figures of artistic bohemia from Eastern Europe and the USSR. He also joined a number of non-conformist Russian artists (such as Ilya Kabakov, Erik Boulatov, Oscar Rabine, Edik Steinberg or Vladimir Yankilevsky) who in the 1980s were forced to leave their native land to join Europe or the United States. . Ackerman then continued to invent an original plastic system, drawing from different areas of human activity: philosophy, religion, literature, but also from the folklore and popular art of his native Transcarpathia.

His work oscillates between the exuberance of ornaments and the minimalism inherited from Malevich – the inventor of suprematism – to whom he pays homage in the series of works produced between 1981 and 2020, which is the subject of the current exhibition at the Gallery. The Minotaur. Child’s Faith (2010) directly appeals to the hanging of the “Latest Futurist Painting Exhibition 0.10” which launched the supremacist movement. Malevich then placed his Quadrangle (black square on a white background) in the angle formed by the walls, underlining the exceptional status of this work which eliminated all reference to the object, by making a clean sweep of all the possible meanings that the ‘one could until then attribute to a work of art and thus fixing the way towards the universality of signs.