Komar & Melamid: A Lesson in History
The exhibition is a retrospective of the two renowned Russian-American artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who worked together as a duo from the late 1960s through 2004. Komar and Melamid emerged from the circle of Soviet nonconformist artists who rejected the Soviet government’s dictate that limited artists to the propaganda-based style of Socialist Realism. Komar and Melamid were among the founders of Sots Art, a style that employed a provocative and ironic manner to expose the absurdities of the official art and the regime as a whole. A paraphrase of American Pop Art’s reaction to the overproduction of consumer goods, Sots Art was a reaction to the overproduction of ideology that rendered Communist slogans and symbols nonsensical.
New Brunswick, NJ
| Zimmerli Art Museum
02-11-2023 - 07-16-2023