Irene Caesar was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1963 to a professor of psychology and to a history teacher. She grew up in an elite circle of Russian intellectuals. She received her education as an artist in the Peterhof art school, class of Mark Tumin, who transferred to her the legacy of Russian constructivism of the 1920s, surviving only via the oral tradition in word of mouth from a teacher to pupil under the strict veto of communists. The message was to look for the meaningfulness of abstraction or for the constructivist foundations of the meaning. In this tradition, art was necessarily conceptual, and philosophy and art were inseparable. Irene Caesar received her BA in philosophy from St. Petersburg University, Russia in 1985. Her visionary art and mystical teaching became widely known in Russia via multiple exhibitions in the major Russian Museums, radio and TV interviews, newspaper articles in the leading Russian newspapers, two documentary films for the St. Petersburg and all-Russia TV, and her book «Art of Spirits» published and distributed by Ivan Fyodorov, the major Russian publishing house at the time. Irene Caesar participated in the decedent movement against the communist regime, was invited to make a speech at the founding conference of the Free Democratic Party of Russia in the days of the 1991 Putsch, and, finally, after 10 years as an artist in Russia, she emigrated to the US in 1994 with a visa O of extraordinary ability on the invitation of Chuck Levitan Gallery in SoHo, NYC. In the US, she transitioned from the traditional media to the digital media, and refined her conceptualist vision of art by getting a Ph.D. in philosophy in 2009 from the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Her art work is in the Duke University Museum of Art, Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University, and Bayly Museum at the University of Virginia. Irene Caesar lives in New York.
Official website:
http://www.irenecaesar.com
Press release for the November 2009 solo show at the Orensanz Art Gallery, SoHo, NYC:
