Building a Dialogue Between the Old Masters and Emerging Artists
by Alina Khalitova 9. 4. 2026
Curatorial essay
There is a kind of curatorial challenge you face when you are handed a body of historical works of museum-level significance and asked to build a conversation around them. The task is not simply about selection or juxtaposition. How do you place living artists in dialogue with a canonized figure? We are taught from our student days that some kind of "dialogue" takes shape when more than one artist is shown in an exhibition. And I was always interested, including as a viewer, in where exactly that line falls between dialogue and opposition. For some reason, at certain exhibitions a suspicion would creep in that what was happening here was no longer dialogue but opposition. Honestly, not falling into that trap was my main task, and I would not have managed it without my co-curator who helped.
This was the question at the center of the exhibition NEITHER / NOR: The Intimate Geography of Contradictions, which opened at Indra Gallery in London from March 2 to 5, 2026. The exhibition was organized by the Centre for Arts, Research and Culture (CARC) in collaboration with the Nina Miller Collection. It brought together lithographs by the German artist Paul Wunderlich (1927–2010) and paintings by Aline Gaiad with works by seven contemporary artists: Aksinia Kupriianova, Elena Magerramova, Lola Alimova, Valeriy Iakovlev, Varvara Dmitrieva, Viktoria Sokolova, and Zibeyda Seyidova.
The Nina Miller Collection is best known as one of the largest private collections of Picasso ceramics, though it extends well beyond that, including paintings, works on paper, photography, and even items of clothing. The group of lithographs was agreed upon with the collection's chief curator from the start, and I was already working on creating that dialogue. The main idea was to show emerging artists alongside a master. Wunderlich reads as very delicate and graphic, and I felt a strong temporal distance from him. His works are not so multi-figured and realistic, and at the same time decorative. Even without an art history education, you understand that this artist is not quite our contemporary; his active practice falls in the second half of the twentieth century. I listened to that feeling and pushed off from it. If an artist today creates multi-figured compositions, what we most often see is baroque, no — rococo, no — something even more lavish and epic, where it is hard to trace where a scene or a figure begins and ends. If they create something surrealist, there will be no room for the mystery and the feeling that exist in Wunderlich's visual code. There is a kind of riddle that reads through it, while contemporary surrealism is all about the inside of the subconscious turned outward, because other artists before us already made that journey. And now we take that path as our own and calmly claim it, the way we claim all paths that some thinker or creator walked before us. I realized that if I turned all of this theoretical-rhetorical stream into an exhibition concept, the result would be exactly that — opposition. And so I decided to choose one thread from what Wunderlich was developing plastically, and show the distance through it. What emerged was a distance from figurative graphic work to abstract painting. This decision brought a lot of air between the works. The air seemed to flatten; a tension arose between the blocks, and I felt I was moving in the wrong direction. My co-curator Michaëla Hadji-Minaglou, who has more experience in curatorial and exhibition work, came to help. Deadlines were pressing, and when I reached out to her I was not expecting any miracle. And then, at the moment of my despair, she sends me a version of the scenography. I had the feeling that I had been trying so hard to say something but it was coming out inarticulate — that I could feel it, and she had translated my feelings into the language of a Shakespearean sonnet. The problem was not my "inarticulateness." I had an excellent set of words, I was just placing them in the wrong order. And Michaëla Hadji-Minaglou showed me in one move, like the fairy godmother in Cinderella, how magic is done.
When Michaëla Hadji-Minaglou and I were developing the curatorial concept, with her bringing considerable experience to the conceptual architecture of the project, we identified the group of Wunderlich lithographs as the historical foundation of the exhibition. Wunderlich, who worked between Hamburg and Paris and over decades developed a distinctively refined figurative language, offered us something unusual. It was works in which figuration and psychologically charged symbolism coexist in a sustained tension. His lithographs move between the photographic and the imagined, between art historical citation and art historical citation. You think of Albrecht Dürer, the enigmatic portraits associated with the School of Fontainebleau.
My responsibility within this collaboration was the selection of the contemporary artists. This is never a process of filling a scheme or searching for works that simply illustrate a curatorial thesis. It requires the ability to listen to the work, to the artists, to what each practice is genuinely doing and what it truly needs in order to be seen clearly. The curatorial concept developed by Michaëla was built around the idea of contradiction as a productive condition. Not opposites in irreconcilable conflict, but opposites held within a single field, where the tension between them becomes the space of meaning. The intellectual frame referenced an idea by André Breton that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Michaëla placed this phrase on the columns of the gallery, repeating it throughout the space as both atmosphere and structural proposition. The way the phrase was formatted spread across the surfaces of the columns, creating an effect reminiscent of Futurist visual poetry, which turned out to be very much in rhythm with the placement of the works on the walls.
Within that frame, I was looking for artists whose practices carry this quality of oscillation, not as a stylistic gesture, but as something intrinsic to the way they work and think.
The diptych by Viktoria Sokolova, Cobalt Echo I and Cobalt Echo II (2026), became one of the important anchors in the contemporary section of the exhibition. Her practice is dedicated to the attempt to bring order to a world in constant dissolution. Viktoria works with grids and strict structures; but the grid in these paintings is not an instrument of control; it is more of a space of negotiation. Acrylic-painted squares were first disassembled and then reassembled on the canvas into a new composition, turning the process of fragmentation and reconstruction into the very subject of the work.
A related theme of fluid form arose in the decision to include paintings by Valeriy Iakovlev, whose practice is primarily sculptural. The work presented, Untitled (Study for Sculpture) (2024), is something he himself does not usually consider an independent artwork. In his own hierarchy of art-making he works in sculpture and is known as a sculptor, and here I was asking him to contribute paintings, which for him typically serve as a preparatory stage. I rarely see contemporary sculptors use painting for that purpose. More often it is pencil drawing, if their drawing skills allow, or new technologies. But Iakovlev, shaped by rigorous academic training, uses painting. In a personal conversation he said that it helps him understand curves and light, that at some point long ago he began thinking through painting toward his future sculpture, got used to it, and never came to see these works as independent pieces.
The paintings by Aksinia Kupriianova, Stars (2025) and Two Faces (2026), are oil paintings. And I am emphasizing the medium here deliberately. Aksinia's graphic work is known for its pronounced figuration, but in painting she works differently. Images surface and immediately begin to dissolve, asking the viewer to constantly readjust their optics. She herself speaks about this distinction, that in painting she never strives for the degree of precision that is available to her in dry graphic technique. It is as if another artist inhabits her the moment she begins a painting, oil itself is very viscous and Aksinia is sensitive to the material she is working with. Clement Greenberg would have fully agreed with her on this. In his Modernist Painting (1960), he insisted that every medium should explore only what is possible within it and in no other. With Aksinia, none of this comes from the head, the way it does with theorists; it comes from the gut, from feeling. She understands that oil painting cannot serve the same purposes as ink drawing.
The participation of Varvara Dmitrieva raised a different kind of question. Her practice is most often encountered through large-format analog photography. These are works documenting ritualistic performances in which she handmakes masks and costumes, exploring questions of gender, geography, and the instability of identity. For this exhibition the decision was made to show not the photograph but the mask itself, Mask (2023), approximately 120 centimeters in diameter, made of wood, sheep's wool, and acrylic on board. This felt necessary. Behind the performances lies a sculptural and material reality of objects, and it seemed important to introduce the viewer directly to that reality rather than to its photographic mediation. The mask as an object also spoke directly to the through-line of the exhibition — concealment and revelation. The function of a mask is precisely to hide a fixed identity while simultaneously performing another.
The work by Lola Alimova, Against the Frame (2023), caught my attention during a studio visit. I was struck by the directness of its proposition. The stretcher frame hidden beneath the canvas becomes visible through the pressure of oil pastel applied to the surface, so that the hidden architecture of the painting becomes its central subject. The work is not so much concerned with abstraction or figuration; it treats the painting as a physical and structural object — what remains present even when the visual part disappears. The stretcher and the canvas. Alimova says this experiment was inspired by encountering the works of Gerhard Richter in person. In photographs online and in catalogues his large abstract canvases always appeared simply perfect, as if painted on a wooden board surface. Seeing the works in real life, she noticed a very slight delay in the movement of the hand and the resistance of the frame against which Richter's hand had pressed. He did not conceal it. And since Alimova in her own work examines movement and gesture, using oil pastel to investigate that question, this fact of the "delay" was what interested her in Richter. After all, the maestro is known for leaving nothing to chance. And if he leaves this "imperfection" in the work, it holds the same place in art history as a brushstroke.
Exhibition scenography by Michaëla Hadji-Minaglou
The practice of Elena Magerramova most often involves work with plexiglass. Magerramova applies layers of paint to the reverse side of thick plexiglass and through this creates an effect of refraction for the viewer, who sees the work from the other side, where the colors are more vivid and the brushstrokes are visible but softened by the transparent surface. It is layering that interests Magerramova. The thickening of paint where layers accumulate, the transparency in other places. A sculptural effect of painting runs through this. Many layers of transparent paint create images that are not fixed. The works presented in the exhibition, The Surface (2026), The Image (2026), and The Screen (2025), build systems of transparency and opacity that are not simply an optical effect; they become an investigation of perception.
The smallest artworks in the exhibition were the paintings by Zibeyda Seyidova, Where Silence Dwells (2025) and Veil of Presence (2025), each measuring thirty by forty centimeters. Scale in Seyidova's practice is not incidental; she deliberately works at a size that refuses to dominate the viewer or the space. In one of the preparatory conversations ahead of the exhibition, Seyidova told me that she wants to create an intimate encounter, where the viewer has to take a few steps toward the painting and choose to enter the territory of the work. When you stand next to one of these paintings and shift your angle slightly, earlier layers and movements of the brush begin to emerge. It is an effect that cannot be conveyed through photography. It is something like a hologram but in painting.
What I had not fully anticipated before the exhibition opened was the degree to which the Wunderlich lithographs would be perceived not as historical anchors but as origins. Michaëla's spatial decision to distribute the Wunderlich works throughout the exhibition space rather than grouping them together ensured a constant alternation of historical and contemporary, not allowing the mind to settle into the simple logic of "before and after." Each encounter with a Wunderlich lithograph after a contemporary work, or with a contemporary work after a lithograph, produced a slightly different configuration of ideas. This is what a well-structured exhibition can do at its best. It turns thinking into movement and movement into thought.
The experience of building this exhibition confirmed something important that I will carry into my curatorial practice going forward. The most productive dialogue between generations of artists is not a dialogue of influence or homage, but a dialogue of the plastic languages that artists each develop in their own work. The contemporary artists in NEITHER / NOR were not set against Wunderlich. They were placed alongside him in an equal conversation.
Alina Khalitova is a curator and artist working between London and New York. She is a member of the PARAZIT art collective and a recipient of the CERINNO Prize from the Nina Miller Collection (2021). NEITHER / NOR: The Intimate Geography of Contradictions was presented at Indra Gallery, London, March 2–5, 2026, organized by the CARC.