Art curator, founder of the Moscow Biennale, Iosif Bakshtein, has died

Art critic, art curator, founder of the Moscow Biennale Iosif Bakshtein died. He died in London after a long illness, – says the obituary published in the Telegram channel of the Moscow Biennale. He was 78 years old.
“Yosif Bakshtein was one of those who turned the first ten years of the 21st century Moscow into a firework of world modern art,” the obituary says.
Bakshtein was born in Moscow, received an education in the field of electronic engineering, then defended his PhD thesis in philosophy. In Soviet times, he worked at various scientific research institutes, in the late 1980s, as a curator, he began to organize exhibitions of informal art in Moscow, in particular, the Club of Avant-Gardists. Later, he organized exhibitions abroad of Soviet conceptual artists, and then of contemporary Russian artists.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, he was a leading researcher at the Russian Institute of Cultural Studies, the director of the Institute of Problems of Contemporary Art, in 2005 he was the curator of the first Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, then he remained a commissioner of the biennale. The author of dozens of works on contemporary art and cultural studies.

Among the exhibitions organized in Moscow under his curatorship, in particular, the exhibitions of Norman Foster, Yoko Ono, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. He also supervised Russian expositions at foreign biennales, including the Venice Biennale.