Detail View: University Art Galleries (UMassD): [ Group Exhibition of paintings and illustrations by the Soviet Conceptualist

Post- Utopia ( Paintings and Installation by the Soviet Conceptualists ) : Eric Bulatow, Ilya Kabakov, and Komar and Melamid

January 23 - February 18, 1989

CVPA Campus Gallery (UMass Dartmouth Galleries)

Lasse B. Antonsen

illustration

painting

http://www1.umassd.edu/cvpa/universityartgallery/publications/overview.cfm

12pu_post_utopia_catalog

book - exhibition catalog

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UMass Dartmouth Art Galleries

Komar, Vitaly

Melamid, Alexander

Russian

Vitaly Komar (1943) and Alexander Melamid (1945)

Vitaly Komar (1943) and Alexander Melamid (1945) are born in Moscow. They attend and graduate from the Stroganov School of Art and Design (1967). Their first joint show, Retrospectivism, appears in the Blue Bird CafÈ (Moscow, 1967). "Even if only one of us creates some of the projects and works, we usually sign them together. We are not just an artist, we are a movement" (from artist's statement). During the late 60's and early 70's, Komar & Melamid found the movement that they call Sots Art, a unique version of Soviet Pop and Conceptual Art, which combines the principles of Dadaism and Socialist Realism. During these years, they also work on Post-Art, pioneering multi-stylistical images prescient of post-modernism, which will become popular in the 80's. They collaborate on various conceptual projects, ranging from painting and performance to installation, public sculpture, photography, music, and poetry. They also collaborate with other artists, for example, Douglas Davis, Fluxus member Charlotte Moorman, Andy Warhol, among others. In 1973, they are expelled from the Youth section of the Soviet Artist Union. In 1974, they are arrested during a performance in a Moscow apartment show and later their works, along with the works of other nonconformist artists, are destroyed by Soviet authorities at the open-door "Bulldozer Show." By 1978 they are living in New York. Their first show in the West is at the Feldman Gallery (New York, 1976), and their first individual museum show is at the Hartford Athenaeum (Harford, USA, 1978). In the 80's, they continue developing their Sots Art (Nostalgic Socialist Realism Series, May 1st Installation at the Palladium Disco) and Post-Art (Diary Series, Anarchistic Synthesis Series, Bayonne, N.J. Series). They are the first Russian artists to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and are also the first Russian artists to be invited to the Documenta 8 (Kassel, Germany, 1987). They devote their projects in the 90's to iconoclasm (Monumental Propaganda, American Dreams), democracy and elitism by statistics (People's Choice), and ecology (Ecollaboration with Animals, Asian Elephant Project). Komar & Melamid's most recent projects are devoted to art as a religion and to the synthesis of irony and spirituality (Van Gogh Art Ministry, Symbols of the Big Bang and Nostalgic Nonconformist Art, a project in progress). They can be found in Oxford's Dictionary of 20th Century Art; The Penguin Concise Dictionary of Art History; Art Since the 40's; Bildende Kunst im 20 Jahrhundert; and Phaidon's The 20th–Century Art Book. Selected individual exhibitions: Museum of Modern Art (Oxford, 1985) and Museum of Decorative Art in the Louvre (Paris 1985–1986); NGBK (Berlin, 1987); Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York, 1989); Museum of Modern Art (Cologne, 1997); Kunsthalle Vienna (Vienna, 1998); Venice Biennial (Venice, 1999); Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art (Japan, 2003); Yeshiva University Museum (New York, 2002–2003). Selected Public Collections: Guggenheim Museum (New York), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Albertina (Vienna), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), San Francisco Museum of Art.

http://www.komarandmelamid.org/chronology.html

Kabakov, Ilya

Ukrainian (active in New York) ; Russican - American

1933 -

Russian-American conceptual artist of Jewish descent, born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He worked for thirty years in Moscow, from the 1950s until the late 1980s. He now lives and works on Long Island. He was named by ArtNews as one of the "ten greatest living artists" in 2000. lya and Emilia Kabakov are Russian-born, American-based artists that collaborate on environments which fuse elements of the everyday with those of the conceptual. While their work is deeply rooted in the Soviet social and cultural context in which the Kabakovs came of age, their work still attains a universal significance. Ilya Kabakov was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Soviet Union, in 1933. He studied at the VA Surikov Art Academy in Moscow, and began his career as a children's book illustrator during the 1950's. He was part of a group of Conceptual artists in Moscow who worked outside the official Soviet art system. In 1985 he received his first solo show exhibition at Dina Vierny Gallery, Paris, and he moved to the West two years later taking up a six months residency at Kunstverein Graz, Austria. In 1988 Kabakov began working with his future wife Emilia (they were to be married in 1992). From this point onwards, all their work was collaborative, in different proportions according to the specific project involved. Today Kabakov is recognized as the most important Russian artist to have emerged in the late 20th century. His installations speak as much about conditions in post-Stalinist Russia as they do about the human condition universally. Emilia Kabakov (nee Kanevsky) was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Soviet Union, in 1945. She attended the Music College in Irkutsk in addition to studying Spanish language and literature at the Moscow University. She immigrated to Israel in 1973, and moved to New York in 1975, where she worked as a curator and art dealer. Their work has been shown in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Documenta IX, at the Whitney Biennial in 1997 and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg among others. In 1993 they represented Russia at the 45th Venice Biennale with their installation The Red Pavilion. The Kabakovs have also completed many important public commissions throughout Europe and have received a number of honors and awards, including the Oscar Kokoschka Preis, Vienna, in 2002 and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, Paris, in 1995.

http://www.ilya-emilia-kabakov.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_WyyQzvSCQ

Bulatov, Eric

Russian

1933 -

After graduating from the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow in 1958, he began working as an illustrator of children's books in collaboration with Oleg Vassiliev. Despite the many constraints imposed by the Soviet regime, Bulatov only left Russia after the fall of the USSR. His works have been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions dealing with Russian art of the twentieth century: OSTALGIA, New Museum, New York (2011) RUSSIA! Guggenheim Museums, New York (2005) and Bilbao (2006), Berlin-Moscow / Moscow-Berlin 1950-2000, Tretyakov-Gallery, Moscow (2003). He also participated in the 43rd Venice Biennale (1988) and the 3rd Moscow Biennale (2009). The NMNM will as well explore links between Erik Bulatov and Ed Ruscha. To this end La Table des Matières on the ground floor of Villa Paloma will present a selection of drawings, from the UBS Art Collection, made by Ruscha between 1960 and 1970. Despite of a relatively small corpus of work, Bulatov managed to get round the constraints of official Soviet art by developing a very personal style. His paintings are mostly iconoclastic assemblies in which image and language are linked. In landscapes, portraits, cityscapes he uses both the iconography of the Soviet regime as well as more traditional representations of nature as his inspiration. The choice of colours, geometric compositions and the use of images from films, art history or advertising define Bulatov's visual language. The typography of the words and their meanings play a crucial role in the spatial composition of his paintings, ranging from a poem by Nekrasov to more mundane words on street signs. The issues which interest the artist have led him to explore the vocabulary in both the Russian avant-garde and more academic painting of the nineteenth century. He looks at the way the picture space works as an interface between him, his message, and the viewer.

http://www.nmnm.mc/en/expositions/villa-paloma/erik-boulatov-peintures-et-dessins-1966-2013.html

[ Group Exhibition of paintings and illustrations by the Soviet Conceptualist

illustration

painting

ca. 1972 - 1987