Born in Tallinn, Estonia in 1980, Alexander Gronsky currently lives and works in Moscow, Russia. His photographic practice focuses on landscapes. Abandoned and quiet, they offer a reflection on the impact of the environment on local populations.
For his series Less Than One (2006-2009), the photographer travelled to Russia’s most isolated regions, where the population density does not surpass one inhabitant per square kilometer. He continues on the same path with The Edge (2008-2009), a documentary essay documenting Moscow enveloped in snow. These wide and hostile expanses are the theater of stories without drama, those of isolated and silent lives. The solemn atmosphere of Gronsky’s universe leaves room only for solitude and meditation.
After receiving the Foam Paul Huf prize in 2010 for The Edge, Alexander Gronsky expanded his horizons, travelling to the edges of China’s megacities: Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzen, where the restless atmosphere creates a disorder nearing chaos. Mountains & Waters (2011) is a series of large-format diptychs in which the photographer applied a Chinese conception of landscape: an intellectual approach rather than a descriptive one.
Pastoral (2008-2012), Gronsky’s magnum opus of Russian landscapes was awarded the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2009. He also received the 3rd prize of the 2012 World Press Photo competition in the « Everyday Life » category. For this series, the photographer returned to Moscow’s suburbs to explore it’s urban fringes and abandoned terrains.
Schema (2014-2016) is the artist’s latest project, which is made up of a series of diptychs realized in collaboration with his partner, the photographer Ksenia Babushkina. Its first chapter was published in the spring of 2016 and the second was published in the winter of 2017/
Solo exhibitions
2020 Repetition, KVOST, Berlin
2019 Repetition, Polka Galerie, Paris
2018 Schema, ISSP Gallery, Riga
2017 Schema, Polka Galerie, Paris
2015 Reconstruction, Wapping Project, London
2014 Pastoral, Yuka Tsuruno Gallery, Tokyo
2013 Pastoral, Polka Gallery, Paris
2012 Mountains and Waters, Polka Gallery, Paris
2011 Pastoral, Photographer.ru/Grinberg Gallery, Moscow
2010 The Edge, Aperture Foundation, New York
2010 Alexander Gronsky, FOAM Museum, Amsterdam
2009 The Edge, Photographer.ru/Grinberg Gallery, Moscow
2008 Background, Photographer.ru/Grinberg Gallery, Moscow
Selected group exhibitions
2023- No man's land, Agency.ArtRu, Moscow
2022- Cosmoscow, booth Agency.ArtRu, Moscow
2018 New Landscape, Yeltsin Center, Ekaterinburg
2014 Close and Far, Calvert 22, London
2014 Act/Reenact, Polka Gallery, Paris
2013 Love of Space, 10th Krasnoyarsk Biennale, Russia
2012 Sense of Place, BOZAR, Brussels
2012 Contemporary Russian Photography, FotoFest Biennial, Houston, USA
2011 Crossroads, Australian Centre for Photography, Sidney
2011 Fotografica, Bogota, Colombia
Awards and Residencies
2015 Flaneur Art Residency, Lodz, Poland
2014 European Eyes on Japan residency, Kochi, Japan
2012 World Press Photo
2011 Prix Photographique Ville de Levallois-Epson
2010 Kempinski Artist Fellowship
2010 Foam Paul Huf Award, Foam Museum, Amsterdam
2009 Silver Camera Grand Prix, Moscow
2009 Aperture Portfolio Prize, Aperture Foundation, New York
2008 Linhof Young Photographer Award
2008 City of Dusseldorf art residency