A Moscow-based gallery is showing cardboard cut-outs of Soviet Art Deco at Design Miami/Basel after Russian authorities refused a temporary export licence for the fair. Heritage Gallery, the fair’s only Russian exhibitor, applied to the ministry of culture for permission to export the objects, including furniture by Nikolay Lanceray and a vase by Vera Mukhina. The ministry “started to ask for more and more papers”, then rejected the application a day before the scheduled shipment, says the gallery’s founder, Kristina Krasnyanskaya. The fair’s organisers proposed the cut-outs “to give me the opportunity to show my pieces, not to lose [the stand cost] completely… and to make my message heard”, she says.
