Art critic and founder of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art Joseph Backstein has died

The famous art historian, art critic, curator and cultural critic died in a London hospital. His wife Katie Dippwell reported this: he left quietly and calmly, she wrote. The founder of the Institute of Contemporary Art and the creator of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art was 78 years old.

Joseph Backstein was the curator of many major art projects. These are exhibitions of the legendary Avant-Garde Club in the 1980s and 1990s, and a project of conceptualists in Butyrka prison, organized in 1992, and an exhibition of “Russian Actionism” in New York, and Russian exhibitions at the European Biennale of Contemporary Art MANIFESTA 4 and at the Venice Biennale. His brainchild was the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, which since 2005 has set the tone in the Russian art environment. Despite the fact that after Backstein left the project, the biennale collapsed, it will remain an important page in the history of art. Joseph Markovich has dozens of publications about contemporary artistic culture and individual artists. And most importantly, the creation of the Institute of Contemporary Art, which, since its founding in 1992, has managed to raise a generation of artists, art critics and theorists. The name of Joseph Backstein has become synonymous with contemporary art in Russia.

In recent years, Backstein began to lose touch with reality and retired. He often visited Moscow, but lived mostly in London. He died in one of the local hospitals.