On Thursday, April 4 at 7 PM, world-renowned artist Vitaly Komar will give a presentation entitled “My Experience as an Artist in Russia and the West” in Althouse 106. The lecture is free and open to all.
During the late 60s and early 70s in Moscow, Vitaly Komar & Alexander Melamid founded the Sots Art movement, a unique version of Soviet Pop and Conceptual Art, which combines the principles of Dadaism and Socialist Realism. In 1973, they were expelled from the Soviet Artist Union and in 1974 they were arrested during a performance and their works destroyed by Soviet authorities. By 1978, Komar & Melamid were living in New York. They continued developing Sots Art through the 1980s, being the first Russian artists to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. They devoted their projects in the 1990s to iconoclasm, democracy, elitism, and ecology. Komar’s work with Melamid has appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MOMA, the Walker Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, and the Louvre, among other places. On their collaboration: “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). Since 2003, Komar has been working independently on New Symbolism, an art movement that “works toward restoring a sundered connection between art and certain historical and timeless myths.”
A print of Komar’s, Air Superiority (pictured), is currently on display in the Trout Gallery:
Vitaly Komar
Air Superiority, 2005
Serigraph on paper
