Zurab Tsereteli, Polarizing Russian Sculptor of Colossal Works, Dies at 91

Zurab K. Tsereteli, a Georgian-Ruso artist whose imposing monuments and heroic statues pleased the authorities in the Kremlin, but caused a contempt from Moscow to New Jersey, died Tuesday at home outside Moscow. I was 91 years old.

His death was announced by Sergei Shagulashvili, his assistant. President Vladimir V. Putin or Russia sent a condolence note to Mr. Tsereli’s family, calling him “an outstanding representative of Russian multinational culture.”

An admirer or Mr. Putin, Mr. Tsereteli presented an imposing bronze statue of him in 2004, dressed in a judo robe with belt. (However, the work was so badly received that he remained with Mr. Tsereteli in his gallery).

The lush work of Mr. Tsereti greatly defined the postsovietic Russian aesthetics. Flamboyante and vivacious, he was able to enchant through the geopolitical limits to obtain the artist position of the unofficial court in the Kremlin in the 1990s while also working on the government of his native distance from Georgia.

In Georgia, where many locals condemned him for staying in Russia, the monument to freedom in Tbilisi, the capital, which replaced a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the main square after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In Russia, Mr. Tsereteli led teams that created some of the largest postsoviet monuments in the country, indicating a austere and geometric style deviation of the communist era in favor of the colorful capitalist Kitsch to the disgust of much of Moscow’s intelligence.

In the 1990s, he helped present the face of a new Moscow through the design of the first Western Style Style Style Shopping Center, in Manege Square, next to the Kremlin. Some said that the mall, with the roof adorned with striking figures in the fairy language, ruined the square forever.

He was later responsible for creating, as an official Russian gift to the United States, a monument dedicated to the victims of terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The monument, a 10 -story slab of high high, the bronze slab divided by a fissure with an unscathed tear in which a tear was issued in the interior in the interior, was going to be erected in Jersey. But in 2004, municipal, municipal officers there. A local arts society described the work as “an inensible piece and enumente of pompousity.” Finally, he settled in Bayona, NJ, in 2006.

The colossal bronze statue of Mr. Tsereteli of Christopher Columbus in Puerto Rico also generated criticism, both for its aesthetics and for its historical context. Located on the road beaten along the north coast and climbing 350 feet, the highest statue of the western hemisphere, the monument presents an imposing columbus on the deck of a smaller candle ship, a hand in the steering wheel of the ship and the other raised it.

Some called it a monstrosity when it was completed in 2016. And many Puerto Ricans opposed their presence, citing violence against native populations durable Columbus in the Caribbean.

Mr. Tsereteli had originally wanted to give the monument to the United States in 1992, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus to the Americas. But every city of the United States to which New York, Boston, Miami and Columbus, Ohio, rejected it.

The large statues of Mr. Tsereteli have erected in other parts of the world, even in the United Nations in New York and London, Rome and Tokyo. In the process he forged personal connections abroad. He was familiar with President Trump, with whom he shared the love for the bomb and grandiosity. Speaking to New Yorker magazine in 1997, Trump called Mr. Tsereteli “Major and Legit.”

The fame of Mr. Tsereteli reached its climax in 1997, when he installed a striking statue of 321 feet high glorifying Peter The Great in the Moscow media, it was known that a city to Peter did not like it. Similar to Columbus monument, the piece puts an imperial -looking Peter on a disproportionately small candle ship with its mast and the candles that rise.

The public rebelled. People signed requests, accusing Mr. Tsereteli or the touch. The city was inyesada with stickers crying, “Down with the tsar!” A marginal left group said he had plans to fly the monument.

But after the death of Mr. Tseretelis, even the referees of good taste, who made fashion see their work, beg their praises. Some praised him as a cunning administrator who defended and helped many artists in problems, financially or other. Others said that while the statues of Hieeo were dominant, their paintings and drawings showed a more elegant and tender side of their talent.

“He was a truly talented artist,” Grigory Revzin wrote, a Russian critic, an obitarian in Kommersant, a Russian business business. “It had a phenomenal sense of color, and was mainly a painter.”

Marath Guelman, a Russian and opponent gallery owner or Mr. Tsereteli, said that although his sculptures were “odious and tasteless”, he was still an important figure in Russian art whose legacy would last.

“Today we understand that this was not the sausage that could happen to us,” he wrote in a Gelman post, a former Kremlin turning doctor who became a vocal critic and left Russia, a publication on Facebook.

In 1999, Mr. Tsereteli founded the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, a vibrant institution, currently directed by his grandson Vasily Tsereti, which houses a collection of important Russian works. The museum has mounted the clashes that highlight promising Russian artists, as well as retrospective exhibitions in honor of leading artists whose works were prohibited from the duration of the Soviet period.

Mr. Tsereti also founded a Museum of Modern Art in Tbilisi. On Thursday and Friday, hundreds of people get used to presenting their last respects. He was buried in the capital on Saturday, in the Pantheon of Didube, along with his wife, Inesa Andronikashvili, and many Georgian cultural figures.

In Moscow, a farewell ceremony, held on Wednesday was our Savior, the main orthodox cathedral in the country. Mr. Tsereteli had helped decorate it in the 1990s.

Zurab Konstantinovich Tsereteli was born on January 4, 1934 in Tbilisi, when Georgia was part of the Soviet Union. He graduated from the Tbilisi Academy of Arts in 1958 and in 1960 he worked as a personnel artist at the Georgia Academy of Sciences, participating in many research expeditions.

In 1964, he went to Paris, where he with Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso and discovered that an artist can do not only paintings but also sculptures and works of porcelain and ceramics. Upon his return to the Soviet Union, he began decorating resorts in the Black Sea with colorful sources covered with mosaics, bus stops and playgrounds that helped the area its flavor to the smell.

During much of his career, Mr. Tsereteli prospered in official commissions of the Soviet and Russian political elite. In the 1970s and 1980s, he designed works for Soviet embassies and the summer house of the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the Black Sea. He was appointed chief artist of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow.

In the 1990s, growing near Mayor Yuri Luzhkov or Moscow, Mr. Tsereteli worked on multiple projects in the city, including the Giant Victory Park, one of the first construction projects of the Nation of Modern Russia. He was elected president of the Art Academy of Russia in 1997.

His daughter, Yelena survive; Three grandchildren; and many great -grandchildren.