White Terracotta Sculpture by Alexandre Ney

Born in 1939 in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union, Alexander Ney lives and works in New York.
The artist’s early childhood was immersed in surviving World War II, marked by the infamous Siege of Leningrad.
He attended both the Art School of the Surikov Institute in Moscow as well as the Academy of Fine Arts in Leningrad after which he began his professional career as a highly productive visual artist, including as a painter and sculptor.
Sometime in the late 1950s, the artist began developing his unique, likely most-recognized artistic signature style involving “perforated” surfaces, and typically in terracotta.
During these years in the USSR, he rejected any affiliation with artistic groups and declined participating in the early “underground art” exhibitions in Leningrad.
Essentially, the concept of any nonconformist art movements – nor their “official” counterparts – conflicted with the artist’s own aesthetic vision and sense of individuality.
The provocative nature of those movements’ trends contradicted with the intimate spiritual goals to which Ney as an artist aspired.
In 1972, with the increase of political repression, Ney and his family immigrated to France, where he frequently lived as a resident artist at the Cité Internationale des arts colony in Paris. During this time, his work was noticed by the American artist Elaine de Kooning, who was visiting the city with some of her students. She asked to meet with the young artist and urged him to come to the United States. In 1974, Ney and his family moved to the USA and settled in New York, where he resides to the present day.
Numerous personal exhibitions took place in galleries such as the Hansen Gallery, Gallery Saireido, and the Mimi Ferzt Gallery; his works have also been featured in countless group exhibitions in the United States and worldwide. Other solo shows include museum exhibitions at The Nasher Museum of Art (formerly known as The Duke University Museum of Art), North Carolina, and the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA), Moscow.
Alexander Ney’s works are in the permanent collections of such noteworthy institutions including but not limited to the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; Rutgers University’s Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA), Moscow; the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; the Museum Beelden aan Zee at the Hayes; and many others.