“Great rarity in the antique world” – Kommersant FM

Kommersant FM columnist Dmitry Butkevich talks about the founder of the gallery and what projects she is currently pursuing.

The Vellum Gallery has existed for almost a quarter of a century. And we have known just as much (really?) with its founder and director Lyubov Agafonova, who, by the way, is celebrating her anniversary today. We are friends with Lyuba both creatively and even with families, which is not often found in our art world.

I remember when the gallery did not yet have its own exhibition space. Then – a bright period of existence in the Artifact center on Prechistenka. But for a long time her home has been Gostiny Dvor. And everywhere and always, Lyuba and her gallery, like a kind of creative conveyor belt, produce exhibition projects.

This, by the way, is very rare in the antique world, in the world of collecting, when a successful collector and dealer regularly carries out cultural projects, publishing books, making documentaries. Agafonova does this all the time.

The gallery has already held more than a hundred exhibitions in museum spaces in Moscow (Academy of Arts, MMOMA, Literary Museum, Museum of Oriental Art), St. Petersburg (Russian Museum), in the regional spaces of Murom, Suzdal, Vladimir, Pereslavl, Torzhok, Lipetsk, Sevastopol and Sudak.

Lyuba is a real passionary in the domestic art world. Now her gallery is holding two exhibitions simultaneously: “Touched by the Sun” (Turkestan avant-garde at the Alexander Solzhenitsyn House of Russian Abroad) and “Korovin and Disciples” at the Pskov Museum-Reserve.

She says about her beloved Korovin: “The person who creates a new space of shorthand becomes one of the most important artists of Russian migration, in whose class there are Natalya Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Alexander Shevchenko and Robert Falk, both Gerasimovs, Fyodor Fedorovsky and Peter Williams. A man who wanted to live, who gushed. He’s a Sagittarius, just like me and my close friends.”

I also had the opportunity to take part in projects associated with the name of Konstantin Korovin: both in the dubbing of one of the films and in curating one of the exhibitions. We are friends, and both are Sagittarius by horoscope.