Life and Adventures of Anatoly Zverev

More than 250 drawings and paintings of Anatoly Zverev, taken from the Sweden collection of Dmitry Apazidis, were displayed at the exhibition "Life and Adventures of Anatoly Zverev".

Dmitry Apazidis (1918–1994) worked as a diplomat in Greece, and later in the Sweden Embassy in Moscow. The collector George Costakis, being a friend of D. Apasidiz, introduced the latter to Anatoly Zverev. That is how one of the most significant collections of Zverev’s works started.

Art director and curator of the AZ Museum Polina Lobachevskaya writes about the collection of Dmitry Apazidis considering the upcoming exhibition: "AZ Museum is hurrying to share with everyone our latest discovery! We were aware of the Apazidis’ collection and even displayed in the AZ Museum some of the graphic works and portraits from it, nevertheless it was hard to imagine that such a unique and large collection of Zverev’s early works (1950s – early 60s) is stored in Stockholm. Dmitry had worked in Soviet Union first in Greek, then in Sweden embassies, and his sons, George and Nick, saved the whole collection and let us present especially striking paintings to a Russian viewer.

The collection of Dmitry Apazidis includes more than 1500 works of the Zverev's early artistic life. We tried to choose the brightest, most unexpected and masterful pieces. For the first time viewers saw Zverev illustrations to the novels by Ilf and Petrov "The Twelve Chairs" and "The Little Golden Calf", also some series of landscapes, sketches, portraits of nearest and dearest — the artist’s and the collector’s family.

Video art, created by the designer Anatoly Golyshev and the cameraman Yury Ermolin are also the part of the exhibition, together with the film of the director Irakli Kvirikadze about adventures of Anatoly Zverev told to his contemporaries.

Anatoly Zverev was born in 1931 and passed away in 1986. For the 55 years of his life he left a huge artistic heritage. Zverev was a complex, much gifted person — masterful painter, virtuoso drawer, avant-guard poet, ironic theorist. Jean Cocteau wrote once: "Zverev was the only artist who worked all the way through Western painting, from early Picasso to the present day".