Born in 1963 in Odessa, Ukraine, Yuri Leiderman has risen in the contemporary art world as a brilliant master of expression. Although Leiderman earned his degree at the Mendeleyev Institute of Chemical Technology (MCTI), his personal interests lay in studying and creating art. He had his first exhibition in Moscow in 1983 when he was only twenty years old and it was not long before he began a formative member of the Moscow conceptualist tradition. In 1987 (incidentally, the same year he graduated from MCTI), he formed the group “Medical Hermeneutics” with Sergei Anufriev and Pavel Pepperstein as a reaction to the dissolution of the USSR, creating a new form of expression. Leiderman left the group in 1990, but has continued to question the familiar and traditional aspects of the visual arts.

Known for his widely varied and even experimental creations, Leiderman does not focus on a specific visual form; rather, he attempts to express concepts that span and connect areas of the sciences, literature, philosophy, and art. For example, a recent exhibition, “Guard Your Honor While You Are Young,” incorporates the work of Alexander Pushkin, the great Russian writer. However, Leiderman prevents this exhibition from becoming about the actual piece of literature – instead, he tries to undermine the way art is categorically described. By combining the written word, performance art, and visual art, Leiderman illuminates the images, the ornamentations, the meanings of these things, allowing the viewer to extract his or her own impression and experience. He has often expressed the value of the “subjective” in his visual and written work and as a result, people’s impressions of it vary immensely.

Leiderman has participated in over fifty group and solo exhibitions in the last decade alone, including a number of international exhibitions in Venice, Istanbul, and Shanghai. A prolific artist in many senses, he has also authored several books of essays, prose, and poetry and in 2005 he was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize, oldest independent literary prize awarded in Russia. Leiderman is inspired by the experience of the individual in literature and in art, he has the power to ignite the fire of that individuality those who experience his art.