Ilya Semenenko-Basin's Blog (484)

I received a Mail Art from Jean-Philippe Gilliot in Belgium. Thank you!

At the end of the year a letter arrived from Horst Tress in Cologne!…

Juan Petry, the founder of Casa del Dragon gallery in Spain (Valencia), sent me his mail-art.

A mail-art artist from Samara, Russia, operating under the pseudonym VIRGO, sent me a collage exactly the size of a postcard.…

And also mail came from Luís Filipe Gomes and from Katerina Nikoltsou. Thanks!…

My Mail Art stream seemed to have dried up completely, and yet in the second half of 2022 I received something in the mail, not much at all. I will publish the results of this half-year today. So, a package from Bruno Chiarlone (Italia)!

Do you remember the cheerful frog on the postal envelope from Carien van Hest? It's time to look inside the envelope. There you will find a collage, it is made on cardboard for games.

Along with the collage come the voices of birds and the scents of the rainforest into your room.…

Judith Dagan's postage stamps are larger. You can clearly see the abstract drawing of the artist and even the microscopic signature.…

A month ago the post office delivered Mail Art by the French artist Zack, and inside the envelope there was a miniature artifact signed by the French artist Brouette Hurlante, among others. Thank you!

Dutch mail-art artist Carien van Hest sent me her new piece in an envelope with a cheerful, carefree frog. Thanks, Carien!

At the turn of summer and autumn, envelopes arrived in the mail from three mail-artists, Carien van Hest (Zutphen, The Netherlands), Katerina Nikoltsou from Greece and Zack from France.

I am very grateful.

Within Mail Art, documents about events can circulate. For example, the German mail-art artist Lars Schumacher, who lives in Burgdorf near Hanover, sent me two postcards - they are notices of a Mail Art exhibition in Berlin last August. Lars was one of the organizers. On the back of the postcards is a poster of the exhibition, with the names of the participants, and on the front (see photo) are the autographs and stamps of the participants etc.…

Mail art from the UK. Kevin Gillen and his son James Gillen, an English artist based in Hawking, Kent, have sent me an invitation to participate in a self-portrait and memories exhibition. Kevin Gillen is an ancestor of mail-art in England.

So, it's about collage and Mail Art.

Recently I received a sheet of ADDandPASS, started by the American artist and musician David Stanley Aponte. After the USA, this sheet went to Finland and then was delivered by mail to Moscow. I went too far and filled the sheet 90% full, so that the contribution of the previous authors is barely…

So, I have broken the rules of the IUOMA and am writing on a completely different topic. I just have a new book out and wanted to tell you about it.

I have published a study about a doctor and philanthropist who worked in a Moscow prison in the first half of the 19th century. He was German, his name was Friedrich Joseph Haass…

I received mail art from Sabrina Schmider.…

Mail Art from Russia to Russia. Thanks to Vlada Laptev for the collage postcard.

I manage to connect to the Internet and the mail continues to work, so I'll share the reproductions of art I received from Luís Filipe Gomes from Portugal. In the envelope I found four sheets; the first three were colour reproductions of Luís's works with the pencil autographs. The fourth sheet is a pencil work. Everything is so eloquent that it hardly needs…

Dear friends, are there any Duke Ellington fans amongst you? Would anyone like to receive a collage card from me dedicated to the music of Ellington?

This spring, the mail-art stream has become very shallow, but it has not dried up. Mail from some European countries still reaches Moscow, and there is also correspondence within Russia. Recently I received artifacts from Vlada Lapteva from Yekaterinburg, from two artists from the UK: Mail_Art_Martha and Kevin Gillen from the UK, from Lutz Anders from Germany, Luís Filipe Gomes from Portugal and Silvia Dubois from Belgium. The exhibition catalogue from Spain has arrived. At the same time the…