The Ludwig Museum’s collection houses an installation titled “The White Cat”. It was created by three artists — Sergey Anufriev, Yuri Leiderman, and Pavel Pepperstein. They are the founding members of “Inspection Medical Hermeneutics” — an artists’ collective that existed between 1987 and 2001.

The installation consists of seven paintings located in various parts of the room. Each painting is a minimalistic black-and-white image. The artists strove to contradict the idea that art should imitate reality. In line with that concept, they decided not to work out every detail and not to use colors in their paintings.

“The White Cat” mocks conceptual works of art that are provided with text commentary which is sometimes too long or completely unnecessary. Anufriev, Leiderman, and Pepperstein signed the paintings as “Seryozha”, “Pasha Pepperstein” and other versions of their names.

This artwork belongs to the Moscow Conceptualism movement which originated in the 1960s. It explored the relationship between an artwork and the words used to describe it.

Members of the “Medical Hermeneutics” group considered some ideas of Moscow conceptualists to be too radical and even absurd.

Sergey Anufriev was born to a family of artists in Odessa in 1964. When he was 18 years old, he started participating in exhibitions which later brought him international fame. Together with artist Sergey Bugaev, known under the sobriquet “Afrika”, he created a series of projects in foreign museums. In 1989, Anufriev was accepted into the International Federation of Artists. Nowadays, he lives and works in Moscow.

Yuri Leiderman was also born in Odessa. In 1987, he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Chemical Technology, but he became an artist when he was still a student. He participated in two Venice Biennale exhibitions — in 1993 and 2003. Currently, Leiderman works and creates artworks in Berlin.

Pavel Pepperstein was born in Moscow in 1966. His father is Viktor Pivovarov, a well-known painter. Pepperstein studied at The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Nowadays he lives and works in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.