Alexander Kaletski paints on cardboard. He collects commercial packaging from the streets of New York, cuts and collages it, and adds line and color to whatever the printing has already left on the surface: logos, barcodes, shipping marks, the crease of a folded box.

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The method began as a constraint. Kaletski arrived in New York in 1975 with no money for paint or canvas, and found the city's discarded packaging both abundant and unusually well made. What started as a substitute became the material he has worked with ever since, alongside a spare painted line on canvas.

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He was born in Monchegorsk in 1946 and trained as an actor in Moscow between 1965 and 1969, going on to work in theater, television and film. Painting stayed private. He avoided the socialist-realist academies, showed in underground exhibitions and performed protest songs.

 

In 1975, facing arrest, he left the Soviet Union: a week in Vienna, a month in Rome, then New York, where he moved from a welfare hotel to a room in Queens and finally to the East Side studio he still works in today.

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He has exhibited in New York, Mexico, China, Japan, Austria, Belarus and France. His work is held in the permanent collections of Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands, the AMMA Foundation, the Claryville Art Center in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belarus, the Meeschaert Collection in France, and the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Collection in California.

 

He is also the author of Metro: A Novel of the Moscow Underground, translated into fifteen languages.