The Moscow Conceptualist, or Russian Conceptualist, movement began with the
Sots art of
Komar and Melamid in the early 1970s, and continued as a trend in
Russian art into the 1980s. It attempted to subvert socialist ideology using the strategies of
conceptual art and
appropriation art. It was an artistic counterpoint to
Socialist Realism, and the artists experimented aesthetically in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, performance, and literature.
The central figures were
Dmitri Prigov,
Ilya Kabakov,
Irina Nakhova
Irina Isayevna Nakhova (russian: Ирина Исаевна Нахова; born 1955 in Moscow) is a Russian artist. Her father, Isai Nakhov, is a philologist. At 14 years old her mother took her to Victor Pivovarov's Atelier. Pivovarov played an ...
,
Viktor Pivovarov,
Eric Bulatov
Erik Bulatov (russian: Эрик Владимирович Булатов; born September 5, 1933 in Sverdlovsk) is a Russian artist, who was raised in Moscow. His father was a communist party official who died in World War II at Pskov, and his mo ...
,
Andrei Monastyrski and
Komar and Melamid.
Mikhail Epstein, in ''After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture'' (1995) explains why conceptualism is particularly appropriate to the culture and history of Russia, but also how it differs from Western Conceptualism:
Epstein (1995) quotes
Ilya Kabakov:
The Moscow Conceptualist artists faced difficulties exhibiting their work in the cultural atmosphere of the late
Soviet Union. At the
Manezh exhibit of 1962, which featured the work of many aesthetic precursors to the Moscow Conceptualists, then-
Party first secretary Nikita Khrushchev excoriated the art and artists he saw there. In 1974, at the infamous
Bulldozer Exhibition, many Moscow Conceptualist artists had their work destroyed when the Soviet authorities brought in bulldozers to clear the field in which the exhibition was held. The art movement was largely ignored outside of the Soviet Union, and within it, it was confined to a narrow circle of Moscow artists and their friends.
See also
*
Soviet Nonconformist Art
The term Soviet Nonconformist Art refers to Soviet art produced in the former Soviet Union from 1953 to 1986 (after the death of Joseph Stalin until the advent of Perestroika and Glasnost) outside of the rubric of Socialist Realism. Other terms u ...
*
Neo-conceptual art
References
Epstein, Mikhail: ''After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture'', Amherst: The
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
External links
Moscow Conceptualism. Russian Conceptual ArtMOSCOW CONCEPTUALISM PRESENTED BY VADIM ZAKHAROV''e-flux journal'' #29
{{Years in the history of fine art of the USSR
Moscow Conceptualists
Moscow Conceptualists
Moscow Conceptualists
Conceptual art