Valeriy Ayzenberg

Born in 1947 in Bakhmach, Ukraine / lives in Moscow, Russia, New York, USA, and Tel Aviv, Israel

Valery Ayzenberg’s artistic biography can be divided into several periods. Not once did he though change his techniques, themes, poetics, and approaches toward art, but one has to accept that his main brainchild was the ESCAPE Program. Having been the consolidating element of the artistic group, he has been the one most involved with its present, and now he keeps its past, the archive. For Valery Ayzenberg, however, the ESCAPE is still existent in the present time. And it really is – in his creative cooperation with Konstantin Adjer.

Chart (2011)

Analytical project

The Chart is the result of a comically pedantic and obsessive (and, of course, ironical) calculation of each member’s contribution into the ESCAPE Program projects that they had created collectively. The chart consists of 12 sheets and is reminiscent of registers compiled by the rating companies. It makes tangible Ayzenberg’s engineering background (he graduated from the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute) and conceptualist roots of his art. Educated as engineer, he became artist in his middle age, and at a certain stage of his career he found a benchmark for his art in the Moscow conceptualism. In the present project complicated human relations in the field of creative work are squeezed into the bare essentials of a chart. In an attempt to 'put harmony to algebraic test' and to sum up the group’s achievements, irony is fundamental for Ayzenberg, who aims it at himself as well as at the others. A fancy for Jesuitical casuistry and toilsome calculations is Valery Ayzenberg’s personal contribution to the psychological ensemble of personalities, who were the ESCAPE Program.