BROTHERS OF THE AVANT-GARDE: David & Vladimir Burliuk
For over thirty-five years, ABA Gallery has built an unrivaled expertise in the art of David and Vladimir Burliuk, two brothers whose radical vision helped ignite the Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde. Long before the wider art world fully recognized David Burliuk's significance, ABA Gallery undertook the patient work of rediscovery: researching, authenticating, and placing his paintings with major museums and discerning private collectors across the globe. That decades-long commitment has done more than preserve a legacy; it has helped write David Burliuk back into the canon of twentieth-century modernism, securing his place alongside Malevich, Goncharova, and Larionov as one of the movement's essential architects.
This exhibition brings together a rare and deeply considered selection of works spanning both brothers' careers—a pairing seldom seen with such depth and care. David Burliuk (1882–1967), the self-proclaimed "Father of Russian Futurism," lived a long and restless creative life that carried him from Ukraine and Russia to Japan and, eventually, the United States, absorbing and reshaping the visual languages of Cubism, Futurism, and folk art into something entirely his own. His younger brother, Vladimir Burliuk (1886–1917), burned just as brightly but far more briefly: killed in the First World War at only thirty-one, he left behind a compact yet extraordinary body of work—fusing Neo-Primitivism, Cubism, and Futurist invention—that stood alongside the movement's most daring names in landmark exhibitions such as Jack of Diamonds and The Target.
To see their work together is to witness a single avant-garde sensibility branching in two directions: one artist granted decades to evolve and experiment, the other frozen at a moment of pure, incandescent potential. Drawing on relationships cultivated over decades with the world's leading curators, scholars, and institutions, ABA Gallery is uniquely positioned to present this dialogue between brothers with both authority and intimacy.
This selection represents not simply a survey of two remarkable careers, but the culmination of ABA Gallery's longstanding devotion to ensuring the Burliuks' rightful place in the story of modern art.
This exhibition brings together a rare and deeply considered selection of works spanning both brothers' careers—a pairing seldom seen with such depth and care. David Burliuk (1882–1967), the self-proclaimed "Father of Russian Futurism," lived a long and restless creative life that carried him from Ukraine and Russia to Japan and, eventually, the United States, absorbing and reshaping the visual languages of Cubism, Futurism, and folk art into something entirely his own. His younger brother, Vladimir Burliuk (1886–1917), burned just as brightly but far more briefly: killed in the First World War at only thirty-one, he left behind a compact yet extraordinary body of work—fusing Neo-Primitivism, Cubism, and Futurist invention—that stood alongside the movement's most daring names in landmark exhibitions such as Jack of Diamonds and The Target.
To see their work together is to witness a single avant-garde sensibility branching in two directions: one artist granted decades to evolve and experiment, the other frozen at a moment of pure, incandescent potential. Drawing on relationships cultivated over decades with the world's leading curators, scholars, and institutions, ABA Gallery is uniquely positioned to present this dialogue between brothers with both authority and intimacy.
This selection represents not simply a survey of two remarkable careers, but the culmination of ABA Gallery's longstanding devotion to ensuring the Burliuks' rightful place in the story of modern art.
