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Gallery history
About Us
The heart and the soul of the 11.12 GALLERY is its founder and owner Alexandr Sharov. He is a driving force and initiative center of all ambitious ideas and concepts by which the gallery stands out qualitatively within Russian art community. Now it’s possible to reveal the corporate identity highlighted 11.12 GALLERY.
The gallery team is free to contact for new enterprises which divide the professional area and get to know more people with contemporary art. That’s why all issues, regarding the affordability of either the whole art content or the technical ways of its showing and implementation, are really important to the gallery. In 2020 the digital terminal was launched. In fact it’s online edition of the gallery located at CUBE Moscow as a specific display stand.
One more thing makes 11.12 GALLERY very special, namely a cooperation with regional artists and artistic institutions. Due to thew fact that artistic activities are really authentic and diverse beyond Moscow, the gallery focuses on it representing the artists from different parts of Russia Omsk, Ufa, Krasnoyarsk, Krasnoyarsk, Kaluga, Tver, Krasnodar, Ekaterinburg.
11.12 GALLERY cooperates with the main Russian museums and organises relevant projects aimed at popularisation of contemporary art. Among them, «Dvoegorsk» by Rinat Voligamsi and «Not Belong There, Not Belong Here» by Slava Ptrk at Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, «Forever» by Damir Muratov at Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. Also the gallery works together with the independent organisations, such as Triennale of Contemporary Art in Garage, Nikola-Lenivets, Museum Center Ploschad Mira in Krasnoyarsk, CCA Winzavod, CUBE Moscow, Triumph Gallery, Rostov Gallery, Miras Gallery, Levaya Noga Gallery, ArtEtage etc.
Besides non-profit projects 11.12 GALLERY cooperates with the organisations in finance and touristic spheres as well as the designers arranging about integration and decoration of high class places with pieces of contemporary art as part of the collaboration projects.
In portfolio of 11.12 GALLERY are participations in such international art events as Art Central (Hong Kong), DA!Moscow (Russia), CONTEXT Art Miami (USA), Art Miami New York (USA), Moniker Art Fair (USA), Art Wynwood (USA), Art Chicago (USA), Cosmoscow (Russia), Art Kiev Contemporary (Ukraine), Art Tbilisi (Georgia), Art Moscow (Russia), Art Stage (Singapore), Art Beijing (China), Art Manege (Russia), Art Vilnius (Lithuania).
founder, inspirer and permanent director of 11.12 GALLERY
ALEXANDER SHAROV
« … I was born in Moscow in 1964. In the 80s, I graduated from the Institute of Communications. In the 90’s I started the packaging business, which later, in the early the ’00s, allowed me to open the first showroom of contemporary art in Barvikha, where I exhibited the works of my artist friends: Lesha Alpatov, Max Basheva, Sasha Zhernokluev, Vladimir Semenskiy. In parallel, I began collecting art. Now I have about a hundred works in my collection (mostly from the beginning of the XXI century). I can’t cooperate with artists on principle if I don’t want to have their work in my collection. It is difficult for an ignorant person to distinguish between collecting and hoarding. I consider myself to be the second type: those who buy randomly based on emotions. A collection is
always a structure that restricts the freedom of choice: whether it is a period, and/or a technique.
Today, I can say that I happy with my success, because the works of artists of my gallery, who once started with me, now live in museums, large private collections, and are sold at international fairs and auctions on both sides of the ocean: from Miami to Singapore.
Quite quickly, within a few years, the showroom was reborn into a full-fledged gallery, which I named from the date of my birth: “11.12”. At the same time, I was lucky enough to settle it in the centre for contemporary art “Winzavod”, where we have been living happily for ten years».
Current projects
Exhibition in the gallery
Sonya Kobozeva
First Love No 2
24 May — 3 July 2022
Almost every girl in her childhood had a cherished dream – to grow up and meet a prince on a white horse who would love her for the rest of her life. Mothers and grandmothers kept saying that you can’t exchange yourself for a hopeless relationship with the first person you meet. The girl grew up and visualized in her dreams the image of the one and only. And finally, he appears on the horizon – perfect, caring and protective. And the girl falls in love. But does she fall in love with him?
In her new project, Sonya Kobozeva talks about the first love, or rather its image, when pink translucent illusions collide with everyday solid reality. Coming into a relationship, a person first of all falls in love with the very image he dreamed in his fantasy: in fact, in his projection. But the more time passes, the more clearly the features of the object of love appear, which have nothing to do with the phantom image created in the head. The idealized performance ends, romantic images die to give way to everyday life. It is this stage that makes it possible to separate the fictional stereotypical shell from the real person. Using personal experience and her memories, Sonya Kobozeva is nostalgic for lost fantasies. They look like an old, but favorite toy that gives her a rush of tenderness and a heart-wrenching feeling of pity because it will never be useful again.
The romantic dreams of Botticelli’s “Spring” are paraphrased by contrast in accordance with the modern time: instead of the poetic image of the beautiful goddess of love in floral clothes, we see a man lying in a tracksuit among plants that are quite recognizable for the urban landscape, such as plantain, yarrow and clover. His pose and foreshortening refer to frogs, which are often dissected in biology lessons, thereby his role changes – from a subject he turns into an object of fantasies. But the “Old Wedding Photo” is already presented as an artifact, and conceals the mystery of the scratched face: maybe it is made by a “viewer”, or the sharp claws of the bride.
This project is perceived by Sonya Kobozeva as a program segment of her life, which she realizes through the prism of the past tense, colored by the irony of tender memories. The artist experiences this time once again, but already operating not the real people, but with symbolic allegories, constructing a theater with a lot of props, but without actors.
