Born 1946, Monchegorsk, Russia
Lives and works in New York City
“I want to use the least to express the most,” states Alexander Kaletski.
Whether in his economical painted line applied on canvas surface or in the use of found materials in his renowned cardboard collages, Kaletski works with a fluent freedom that belies the rich layers of meaning in his art.
Kaletski learned early that the imagination was a unique kingdom that could not be conquered by bureaucracy and knew to avoid the strictly controlled environment of socialist-realist art schools. Instead, he pursued the more free-wheeling world of the theater while visual art became his private underground practice. Alexander studied acting in Moscow from 1965 to 1969 and went on to a highly successful career on stage, television, and film productions. At the same time he held underground art exhibitions and performed songs of protest. In 1975, fleeing political prosecution and the threat of arrest by the KGB, Alexander Kaletski left the USSR. He went first to Vienna for a week, then to Rome for a month, and finally New York where he initially lived in a welfare hotel, then a room in Queens and finally an East Side studio he still uses today.
The first years in America as an artist without money to buy paint or canvas, Alexander was drawn by his natural talent for improvisation to the thousands of cardboard boxes that litter the streets of the Big Apple. Kaletski became enthralled with the high quality of disposable packing materials in the USA. For the artist, those boxes provided unique, if unusual, components for the creative process. Beginning with commercial cardboard packaging he collaged the material adding line and color.
ALEXANDER KALETSKI (b. 1946, Russia), immigrated to the United States in 1975. He lives and works in New York City. The artist has exhibited widely in shows internationally including New York, Mexico, China, Japan, Austria, Belarus and France. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Voorlinden Museum in the Netherlands, AMMA Foundation, the Claryville Art Center in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belarus, the Meeschaert Collection in France and the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Collection in California. His work has been reviewed in Architectural Digest, Associated Press, Modern Painters, Vanity Fair and National Review among other publications. Kaletski is the author of the autobiographical novel "Metro: A Novel of Moscow Underground,” an international bestseller that has been translated into fifteen languages.