October 8, 2010 - 19:44 AMT
Avdey Ter-Oganyan’s Radical Abstractionism series paintings to be exhibited in Louvre

Avdey Ter-Oganyan’s Radical Abstractionism series paintings will be exhibited in Louvre on October 14-January 15 within the framework of Russian Year in France.

Earlier, the paintings were banned from being transported abroad, as containing an “urge for stirring inter-religious hate and violence and forcible alteration of Russian constitutional structure”.

However, as Russian Ministry of Culture reported, permission to transport the paintings to the exhibition site was granted on October 7.

The name of Avdey Ter-Oganyan is known in Russia beyond the sphere of art. At the turn of the centuries his name was on the lips of the most opposed layers of society: ultra right chauvinists and human rights activists. The subject of heated debates was an action by the artist that parodied "iconoclasm": he chopped up cheap copies of icons with an axe. Currently, Ter-Oganyan is a political refugee living in Prague. However, his return to his art has been achieved. Presently, Ter-Oganyan is developing a method he thought up at the beginning of the 1990s – copying famous Modernist paintings under the guise of a provincial master.