A posthumous double bill at two galleries – XL in Moscow and Iragui in Romainville – reveals Nikita Alexeev as an artist who spent decades mapping invisible trajectories between word and image, private memory and collective history.

The solo exhibition of Nikita Alexeev (1953–2021), ‘Passages and Paths’ at XL Gallery in Moscow, together with the project ‘Foreign Words’ at Iragui Gallery in Romainville, on the outskirts of Paris, forms a posthumous diptych devoted to an artist who spent his life charting invisible trajectories: between word and image, private experience and collective memory, the Moscow kitchen table and the global art scene. Taken together, the two projects read less as a memorial than as a single extended exhibition connecting the artist’s spaces across Russia and France, while bringing together the key formats he developed over recent decades: expansive graphic series, accordion-fold works, and text functioning as an autonomous visual element.

Born in Moscow in 1953, Alexeev passed through the Soviet system of art education, studying at the Moscow Art School attached to the Surikov Institute, the Art College in Memory of 1905, and the Moscow Polygraphic Institute, where he specialised in graphic art and print design. As early as the 1970s, he was already producing samizdat albums and books. That experience of working with sequence and the turning of pages never disappeared, returning in his so-called leporellos and long “accordion folds”, where the book literally unfolds into exhibition space. From 1976 onwards, Alexeev participated in Andrei Monastyrsky’s (b. 1949) group Collective Actions. Their now-canonical trips to fields outside Moscow, where “almost nothing happens” yet everything is later described and documented with great care, sharpened his sensitivity to distance, route and duration. In parallel, in 1979, he was among the founders of the Moscow Archive of New Art (MANI), which began cataloguing the unofficial scene. A few years later, between 1982 and 1984, Alexeev ran the apartment gallery APTART from his own home, transforming a modest Soviet flat into an exhibition space that, during exhibitions, effectively shed its physical limitations. These three frameworks — action, archive and space — remain the underlying subtext of both current exhibitions.

‘Passages and Paths’ at XL Gallery renders that subtext almost literal. At the centre of the tall hall at Winzavod, the series ‘Dharma Hobos’ stretches across two long parallel rows: monochrome drawings on dark grey and brown paper, mounted as elongated accordion folds. They cannot be grasped in a single glance; they must be traversed, requiring the viewer to engage the body fully in the act of comprehension. Alexeev’s work is never a single sheet but a rhythm of repetitions, pauses and small shifts that emerges through movement. In this sense, the installation continues the logic of Collective Actions: here the path is not a metaphor, but a fundamental artistic unit.

Around the perimeter of the space, XL presents ‘Screens’ — a partial reconstruction of the eponymous 2007 exhibition at the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture. The display includes painted and drawn panels joined by hinges, each equipped with its own light source. The light is directed inwards, into the “pocket” formed by the bend or angle of a screen positioned close to the wall. Smaller screens are placed on shelves; in the 2007 exhibition they had been laid out on the floor. What is concealed is paradoxically brought to the fore: light, space, emptiness. The lantern, incidentally, is another recurring artefact, a fixed point within Alexeev’s spatial world.

In the texts accompanying his 2007 exhibition ‘Screens’, Alexeev introduced the notion of the “interior geography of the home”, in which heavy furniture corresponds to “geological features”, while lighter furniture stands for “vegetation” and “monuments”. ‘Passages and Paths’ at XL is built directly from this metaphor: screens, panels and sheets function as temporary partitions, wrested from space by the artist’s gesture. The screen here is not a piece of furniture but an instrument for appropriating a fragment of reality, temporarily placed within a zone of heightened semantic concentration. The exhibition’s structure underscores the serial nature of Alexeev’s thinking: his works exist in chains, rhymes and repetitions. The memory of Soviet oilcloth tablecloths, the emblematic actions of the late 1970s, and the apartment gallery of 1982–1984 is stitched together here with the late drawings, turning the fabric of the works into a dense archive of lived time.

Where XL foregrounds movement and space, ‘Foreign Words’ at Iragui focuses on language and memory. Curators Alexandra Obukhova and Alastair Hicks describe the experience of encountering Alexeev’s work as “an endless game of Chinese whispers”. During his lifetime, the artist actively interpreted his own drawings and paintings; after his death, that act of interpretation inevitably passes to others. The central work is a long accordion-fold drawing that Alexeev himself called a “leporello” — a polygraphic term derived from the name of a servant in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, rather than simply “accordion fold”. This terminological precision is not incidental: for Alexeev, words always carried cultural baggage, and he was unwilling to discard it.

Hicks emphasises that Alexeev “lived inside his own head”: his art is constructed from “building blocks” of words and images, organised in a deliberately theatrical, almost operatic register. At the same time, his choice of motifs clearly registers the legacy of Pop Art: a box of Tide washing powder, a plastic bottle, nail scissors transformed into a bird. These objects appear not as ironic quotations but as components of precise visual puzzles in which text and image carry equal weight.

A separate body of work is linked to the series Alexeev called ‘Pop (Bubbles and Lyrics)’. In an accompanying text, he recalled the Lou Reed and John Cale album ‘Songs for Drella’ and a newspaper headline announcing that “Pop music becomes Pop Art”, describing Warhol as a “profound, even mystical artist”. He also acknowledged with characteristic frankness that popular culture as such always felt alien to him, whereas the pop songs of his youth were of the utmost importance. He insisted that these works were not illustrations of specific hits, describing them instead as “a verbal rainbow of bubbles”. Textual fragments rise through fields of colour like soap bubbles: they appear, shimmer and vanish. What matters is not the literal meaning of the line “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”, but its visual and mnemonic presence.

In Romainville, the title ‘Foreign Words’ acquires an additional layer. The words carry precise biographical weight: in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Alexeev lived in France for several years, and his return to that country today takes the form of a posthumous exhibition, in a different institutional and political context. What was once private experience returns to French territory as art-historical material. In the Iragui exhibition, this return assumes an almost literal, bodily scale: among the works on view is a nearly four-metre accordion-fold piece from 1987, executed entirely in French — the year of his move to France, when the artist’s private lexicon first unfolded within a new, already French context.

In this sense, ‘Passages and Paths’ and ‘Foreign Words’ not only take stock of Nikita Alexeev’s career but also clarify his place within a broader post-Soviet context. Moscow and Romainville, apartment gallery and white cube, the underground of the 1970s and the institutional exhibitions of the 2020s — all are joined here into a single topology: a network of passages and paths, screens and words, in which the artist appears simultaneously as participant in history, commentator upon it, and his own archivist. In this diptych, his work acquires a new point of entry — biography, understood as yet another carefully constructed passage.

'Passages and Paths’ activates trajectories running from Collective Actions and the MANI archive to the apartment gallery, showing how they condense into the formats of the accordion-fold drawing and the screen. ‘Foreign Words’, by contrast, foregrounds Alexeev’s engagement with language and his ambivalent relationship to popular culture — at once distanced from its mass-market dimension and deeply bound to its music. In both cases, biography is not directly illustrated but stitched into the forms themselves: into the invention, or rather appropriation, of terms such as leporello; into the insistence on elongated sequences; into the transformation of painting into spatial partition. From today’s vantage point, these two relatively modest projects resist the familiar reduction of Nikita Alexeev to a single role or period, and instead invite us to see in him an artist who, over decades, worked consistently through the same concerns — path, screen, text — under changing political and institutional conditions. His late works may well constitute the most precise formulation of that long inquiry.