A red door, a black window, a vertiginous tunnel drawing the
viewer into the infinite dark: Many images in “Breaking the Ice” are bold and
simple. Others are layered and textured.
Dmitri Plavinsky’s metaphysical collages include seeds,
matchsticks, fragments of lace, or woven reeds; Oscar Rabin’s extraordinary
Soviet cityscapes are rendered in thick impasto with embedded food labels. From
Vladimir Veisberg’s white cubes to the faux-desecrated paintings in Ilya
Kabakov’s installations, this exhibition is, by turns, intense and subtle,
comic and eerie, moving and thought provoking.
In fact two major exhibitions of Russian art opened last
week, simultaneously and confusingly, in London’s Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea: a
huge display of contemporary works, and a survey of late 20th-century
masterpieces.
Many visitors assume the shows are linked, that “Breaking
the Ice” (on the top floor), is some kind of prequel to the installations and
photographs below it. Certainly, it makes sense to start at the top, but, in
some ways, the louder, larger, less thoughtful exhibition on the first two
floors is a distraction from the historic treasures in the attic.
The art in“Breaking the Ice” is carefully curated from Moscow’s
fecund period of underground creativity, between Stalin’s death and
perestroika; it includes the Thaw-era rebirth of abstraction and modernism, pop
art, conceptualism, and more. The exhibition is funded by the Tsukanov
Foundation, which now owns a large number of works from the “second Russian
avant-garde.”
London-based Igor Tsukanov is charmingly understated.
Although his family’s collection contains enough works from this period to fill
several exhibitions, he has enlisted other collectors to produce the strongest
possible show. During the selection process, he deferred to curator Andrei
Erofeev. “It’s not about what I like or what I think,” he told RBTH in an
interview last week.
The entrance to the exhibition is lined with black and white
photographs, conjuring up the city and epoch that gave birth to these striking
works. Abstract or metaphysical art in the Soviet Union was necessarily
political, but many of these artists were concerned with creative freedom
rather than overt protest.
The official state-sanctioned aesthetic involved
Socialist-realist depictions of scenes that glorified the achievements of the
communist government. The un-official works on show became known, as the
curator Erofeev explains in the massive catalogue, through the “magic and
invincible power of art.” Produced in hidden studios, rumors of their
brilliance spread through Moscow’s artistic circles.
Abstraction to Sots Art
The exhibition is organized thematically, with works grouped
according to stylistic tendencies and genres. Abstract artists like Lydia
Masterkova deliberately resurrected the pre-revolutionary experiments of the first
avant-garde. Francisco Infante’s“Space-Movement-Infinity” is a mass of lights
and metal in geometrical patterns spinning inside each other, like the kinetic
mobiles of the early constructivists.
The floating, fauvist faces of Oleg Tselkov’s luminous crowds
also look back to modernist experiments, but they do more than this. Fellow
artist, Eric Bulatov, commented on Tselkov’s works: “They have nothing to say
about the time and place in which they live. They are of a different nature …
they emanate from the dark and sinister things lurking at the bottom of any
man’s soul.”
Bulatov’s own
paintings, represented towards the end of the exhibition, include the
celebrated “Vkhoda Net.” The Russian word “Vkhod” (“entrance”) recedes from
both sides of the picture into the distance; the pale blue color and
foreshortened perspective suggest the open sky, but the words are obscured by
an angry “Vkhoda Net” (“no entrance”) in two-dimensional red.
At the same time, the letters “DA” (“yes”) appear in the
center of the painting. Bulatov’s works play with ideas of space and of
volition. One wall of the exhibition is dedicated to Bulatov’s huge black
square with a white dot in the middle. The artist spent months measuring the
invisible lines behind this work, one of many tributes to Kazimir Malevich’s
famous 1915 “Black Square.” Alexander Kosalopov, whose “Coca Cola Lenin” and
eye-shadowed Gorbachev are icons of Russian pop art, humorously transforms
Malevich’s square into a symbol on a cigarette packet.
Two rooms contain
works by the inventors of “Sots Art,” Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. Sots
Art is a hybridization of pop art and socialist realism, as Komar explained:“If
pop-art was born by the overproduction of things and their advertising, then
Sots Art was born of the overproduction of ideology and its propaganda.”An
ironically nostalgic series of paintings from the 1980s includes a chained bear
and a red flag.
Tsukanov hopes the exhibition will bring the art he loves
not just to a wider audience, but a new generation. The Saatchi gallery, with
its free entry and large-scale installations, is attractive for younger people
and Tsukanov sees this show as breaking out of the “small world” of collectors
and specialists.
Art dealer Mark Kelner, who has worked with Tsukanov since
2006, agreed.
“That’s the point of the show, to look at Russian post-war
art as it crosses over into the international scene,” he told RBTH last week.
He praises Tsukanov’s skill in bringing collectors together.
“Anyone could have bought paintings,” he said, “but not everyone can excite a
community.” For Kelner, “this is the show that everything will be measured up
to for years to come.”
“Breaking the Ice: Moscow Art 1960-1980s” runs at the
Saatchi Gallery until February 24th 2013.