Mexican artist, filmmaker, and musician Ricardo Nicolayevsky died yesterday at the age of 62. A multifaceted queer artist, he featured themes around gender and sexuality in his work that spanned across numerous artistic disciplines, including film, video, music, literature, and cabaret.
He’s best known for Lost Portraits (1982-1985), a series of lyrical portraits of friends and colleagues shot on Super8 and 16mm shot in the eighties in New York City. Some of Nicolayevsky’s film and video work are part of the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Born in Mexico City in 1961, Nicolayevsky started developing painting and writing skills at an early age. In 1980, he moved to New York City, where he got a BFA from New York University (NYU) in Cinema Studies, and also took musical composition and musicology classes with Samuel Zyman and David Bradshaw. In 1987 and 1988, Nicolayevsky premiered his own compositions for piano at the Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall. From the early eighties on, he composed music for short films, theater works and radio programs.
During his years in New York, Nicolayevsky developed his ambitious series Lost Portraits, a collection of experimental portraits of artists and close friends. Each vignette was accompanied by a carefully crafted soundtrack, which he also composed. The series premiered in the late nineties, and was awarded the top prize in the experimental category in the Mexico City’s International Film Festival, and was screened at numerous international venues.
In 2005, he premiered his series Portraits for a New Millennium, which consisted of 25 vignettes of friends and colleagues of the artist, which he shot in Mexico City, New York and Paris. Other film and video pieces include Scratches on My Brain (1982), NYC '83 (1983), 2 Exercises (1985), Mexican Cinema for Dummies (2001-2002), and The Private Life of a Former Artist.
Nicolayevsky’s work has been included in individual and collective shows in various galleries, museums, festivals, and universities in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Peru, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. In 2003, he became a Rockefeller Foundation fellow in its Media Arts Program, and in 2006, MoMA honored his work with the solo event “A Night with Ricardo Nicolayevsky.” In 2009, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City featured his portrait series, and in 2018 the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros presented a full retrospective of his work.
In addition to his film and video work, he also ventured into performance and cabaret, and in 2004, he was invited to perform at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) with his group of improvised music “Cabaret Gutenberg.” In 2010, he published the collection book 300 Aforismos, and his upcoming book Mamotreto, of over one thousand pages written over twenty years, is slated to be published later this year.
