ALEXANDER KALETSKI (b. 1946, Russia), immigrated to the United States in 1975. He lives and works in New York City. The artist has exhibited widely in shows internationally including New York, Mexico, China, Japan, Austria, Belarus and France. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Voorlinden Museum in the Netherlands, 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. His work has been reviewed in Architectural Digest, Associated Press, Modern Painters, Vanity Fair and National Review among other publications. Kaletski is the author of the autobiographical novel "Metro: A Novel of the Moscow Underground," an international bestseller that has been translated into fifteen languages.

It is but a single step from Utopia to the absurd – a fact familiar to the generation of Russian painters who worked in the deconstruction of Soviet ideological symbols. Born in Soviet Russia during the bloody reign of Stalin and coming to age in the iron-gray era of Brezhnev, Kaletski learned early that the imagination was a unique kingdom that could not be conquered by bureaucracy and knew to avoid the strictly controlled environment of socialist-realist art schools. Instead, he pursued the more free-wheeling world of the theater while visual art became his private creative practice. Upong emigrating to teh United States n 1975 it was only natural that he experienced a passionate desire to create something radically different from the seriousness of the Socialist Realism, whose utopian aspirations were expressed in dogmatic language and the politicization of any and all subject matter. Western modernism and Russian avant-gardism were the poles of attraction and inspiration to those independents departing from the socialist realist canon.