Founded in 2001 by Natalia Grigorieva-Litvinskaya and Eduard Litvinsky, Lumiere Brothers Gallery is one of the oldest galleries in Moscow, which specializes in photography. The gallery represents works by celebrated Soviet constructivists and reporters from the 1930s. The gallery has reintroduced and promotes the artworks of photographers from the Khrushchev Thaw and was one of the first galleries, who started to collaborate with artists from the Lithuanian school of photography.
About
The gallery represents the classics of the Soviet constructivist photography: Boris Ignatovich, Jakov Khalip, Mikhail Prekhner, whose innovative techniques – unconventional angles, tilted horizons, stark contrasts of light and shadow – reveal influence of their teacher and associate Alexander Rodchenko and recall the formal experiments of Moholy-Nagy Laszlo and New Objectivity group led by Albert Renger-Patzsch. The photography of Stalin’s era represented by the gallery encompasses socialist realism work by celebrated Soviet reporters such as Mark Markov-Grinberg, Emmanuil Evzerikhin, Arkady Shaikhet; architectural photography with its iconic views of cityscapes, pioneered by the foremost chronicler of Moscow life Naum Granovsky; reports from battlefronts by war correspondents like Alexander Ustinov and Robert Diament. The gallery has been at the forefront of reintroducing and promoting the work of the top notch photographers of the Thaw of the 1960s and 1970s: Yuri Krivonosov, Yuriy Abramochkin, Lev Borodulin, Vladimir Lagrange, Igor Gavrilov, Lev Sherstennikov, Vladimir Bogdanov, Nina Sviridova, Dmitry Vozdvizhensky, Igor Gnevashev and others who, inspired by postwar optimism and liberal reforms, revived straight reportage and gave a fresh impetus to artistic photography, to which they were introduced in photo clubs spread across the USSR. The gallery represents the works by Romualdas Požerskis, the representative of the Lithuanian school, which stood out against the Soviet photography for its distinctive national aesthetic and tools – use of wide angle lens, close-ups, and sharp contrasts. Postwar European and American art is represented by the reporters of the golden age of photojournalism: Steve Schapiro, Ruth Orkin, Sabine Weiss, and artists who pushed the boundaries of photography in both their subject choice and technique, noted for his unmanipulated self-portraits in the landscape. The gallery's pool of Russian contemporary artists encompasses a variety of styles, which flourished in the Russian photography during the last three decades, featuring underground artist from the 1980s Sergey Borisov, conceptualist Vadim Guschin, whose simple forms and abstract composition is rooted in Russian avant-garde tradition, one of the forefather of St Petersburg school of photography Alexander Kitaev and contemporary architectural photographers Vladimir Antoschenkov, admirer of St Petersburg, and Igor Palmin, centered on the exploration of Moscow modernism. The gallery showcases artists of the international contemporary scene such as Laurent Chehere, famous for his surreal series of flying houses of Paris, Wendy Paton, whose black-and-white lyrical night scenes result from unraveled mastery of film camera and method of gelatin silver printing. In 2015 the gallery participated in Fotofever Art Fair in Paris. Since 2016 takes part in International Contemporary art fair Cosmoscow, and since 2019 participates in other International Russian art fair DA!Moscow.
