Marat Guelman is a curator, gallery owner, and cultural figure who played an important role in shaping the post-Soviet contemporary art scene. He was born in 1960 in Chisinau (then USSR). After starting his career as an engineer, he founded one of the first private contemporary art galleries in Moscow in 1990. Gelman's gallery quickly became a center for provocative, politically charged art, helping artists such as Oleg Kulik and the Blue Noses make a name for themselves and providing a platform for works that challenged official narratives in an era of social change.
In the 2000s, Guelman expanded his influence beyond Moscow by becoming director of the PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art in Perm. There, he used contemporary art as a tool for developing cultural and civic life in the regions, organizing festivals and exhibitions that attracted nationwide attention. However, his outspoken political stance and support for controversial artists led to conflict with the authorities. Faced with censorship and pressure, Gelman left Russia and settled in Berlin.
In recent years, he has focused on AI—art created with the participation of artificial intelligence—founding the Guelman & Unbekannt gallery in Berlin, one of the first in Europe entirely dedicated to AI art.
This project was created by an artist who aspires to become a kind of Jewish Andy Warhol. On the one hand, he wants to be like him, but on the other hand, he is constantly in discussion with him, arguing with him. Like Warhol, he is inclined towards iconic images and likes to repeat his favorite subjects. Like Warhol, he goes against the grain: while everyone else has rushed into AI and generative art, he insists on painting made by an artist with a brush and oil paint. Of course, he dreams of Andy Warhol's fame, but he only started working at a time when it became difficult, and sometimes dangerous, to be Jewish. He is originally from Russia and was immediately confronted with two cancellations: Cansel Russian Culture and Cansel Jewish Culture. But of course, bypassing the image of “Gelman the Jew,” everyone is immediately interested in how this artist relates to the real person Marat Guelman—a well-known gallery owner, museum director, collector, curator, and now also an artist.
Guelman appears here as Diogenes—a “sarcastic and evil individualist who demonstrates that he needs no one.” And even this text is written by me, Gelman, announcing the advent of an era of absolute individualism in art. Here, I cynically use artificial intelligence to create artistic agents—Guelman the artist, Guelman the curator, Guelman the critic, Guelman the gallery owner, Guelman the collector.
Cynicism as a cultural position entered art simultaneously with modernism, after the collapse of values during World War I. In the mass perception, cynicism has a negative, reactionary connotation and is associated with conformism. However, if we turn to its source—ancient cynicism—it becomes apparent that the Guelman-Jew project employs its basic techniques: the struggle against elitism and the pretensions of the initiated, “low” theory that brings grotesque embodiment to the fore.
As Peter Sloterdijk writes: “In a culture where ossified idealism has made lying a way of life, the process of truth depends on whether there are people who are aggressive and free (‘shameless’) enough to speak the truth.”
In principle, Russian art has a long tradition of creating art on behalf of fictional characters, with Kozma Prutkov, Charles Rosenthal, invented by Ilya Kabakov, and I. V. Klimontov by the duo Komar and Melamid coming to mind first. This allows the author to not shy away from banalities and blunt solutions. But for the first time, the author and the character bear the same name, and in fact, the real Marat Gelman conveys a great deal of autobiographical material to his fictional artist.
In relation to him, Guelman's Jewish identity is not so obvious. He is known as a Russian gallery owner who was born in Moldova and is a citizen of that country, lives in Montenegro, and is opening a gallery in Berlin. Does Marat Guelman feel Jewish?
The answer we find at the exhibition is yes. And Guelman truly felt Jewish when his colleagues around the world began to speak out against Israel, denying Jews the right to their own country, to life, and it became unsafe in Europe. At that moment, Marat Guelman decided that he was Jewish and that he had to declare it loudly.
Returning to the works themselves, we discover the artist's reflections on what it means to be Jewish in art. The author's cynicism is quite skillfully concealed by the character's love of painting as such. Focusing on the nuances of painting, sketchiness, incompleteness, the desire to see the viewer as a co-author—these are the qualities that, according to Marat Guelman, should be inherent in a Jewish artist. He wants to be like Andy Warhol, but he does not have a printing press or silk screen, so he makes all the repetitions by hand, thus forcing the viewer to immerse themselves in the search for differences between the repetitions, which are in fact variations.
With the help of this illusion of handicraft, of careless brushstrokes, Marat Guelman strives to make the viewer forget for a moment that what they are looking at is a product created by AI.
But here is a blonde woman in an evening gown next to women in oriental clothing and with automatic weapons (one of whom, it seems, has a halo) — from what mountains of information garbage and visual clichés was this picture extracted? Who came up with it — completely artificial intelligence, or was there someone behind it? Is it possible to cope with the description of the plot by trying to identify the stereotypes used, such as the meeting of the East (Near) and the West? Or use the dichotomy: woman and war? Or maybe sincerity (patriotism, automatic weapons) and lies (consumerism, Hollywood) collide here? Or perhaps the internal contradictions of capitalism: show business and the military business?
In the case of the Guelman-Jew project, all the references here, whichever you choose, lead to the taboo zone “from the river to the sea,” to a multitude of problematic points that trouble the viewer: whose side are you on?
The audacity with which digital remakes created by AI on the Jewish theme are introduced into the exhibition space takes us back to the origins of modernism—to Marcel Duchamp's blasphemous urinal with the outline of a woman's head in a cape and the anagram signature: R. Mutt—Mutter. Half a century later in the USSR, the underground duo Vitaly Komar & Alexander Melamid created a different variation of Madonna – “Portrait of a Wife with a Child,” scandalously violating the “purity” of nonconformism by using the language of Soviet street propaganda.
Throughout the 20th century, artists employed strategies to purify contemporary art of dead values, academic clichés, and ideological canons by invasively introducing anti-art artifacts that cynically refuted established aesthetic norms. Damien Hirst's project “Treasure from the Wreck of the ‘Incredible’” can be considered the last grandiose act of provocation—a fake sunken ship, which the public in Venice viewed with the same excitement, as if they did not know that it was a complete fake.
In the Guelman-Jew project, the collaboration with AI is just as shameless, both from the point of view of leftist ideology and Jewish national identity. For example, there is a character in a kippah playing the violin, from which automatic gunfire simultaneously erupts. He is devoid of even a hint of heroism, as in Tarantino's “inglourious bastards”; he is more like a slightly caricatured image of a Jew from a Polish or Ukrainian shtetl.
In Europe today, the attitude towards Jews is positive and respectful. Europeans are ready to clean memorial plaques, condemn the actions of their ancestors, and sincerely demonstrate guilt. Europe wants to be good to Jews, as if to compensate for what can no longer be fixed. There, a Jew with a cello, violin, or tie is a symbol of culture, intellect, and refinement.
The emergence of Israel as a separate state changed the lives of all Jews — not only those who live there, but also those who live outside its borders.
This created a new structure of self-relationship, a new responsibility. Now, a Jew anywhere in the world is not just a representative of a minority, but a participant in a great history connected with the state, with territory, with power.
Israel is building a completely different image — one of strength, armed, capable of defending itself. A person who exchanges a violin for an automatic weapon does not cause shock there. It is part of the norm. Meanwhile, in Europe, this is completely unacceptable. This gives rise to the concept of “good and bad Jews” — a Jew with a violin is perceived as “good,” but when he picks up an automatic weapon, he immediately becomes “bad.”
This duality, this internal conflict between the image of the victim and the image of the defender, is one of the most painful and honest themes of contemporary Jewish identity. My project is a tribute to my Jewishness, to the memory of my mother and my numerous relatives. It is about how I am re-examining my own origins as an artist.
