‘Komar & Melamid’ Book 1988
Komar & Melamid
New York: Abbeville Press, 1988. Hardcover. Red cloth boards, red glossy DJ with color illustration. 208 pp., 185 illustrations in color and BW. Like New. Firts Edition. Excellent Condition. Gift from the artists whn I worked in a fancy gallery in New York in the early 1990’s.
Asking USD$150
Text in English. From the DJ: Whatever world they find themselves in is illuminated by the brilliant flashes of Komar and Melamid’s high-intensity wit. As dissident artists in Moscow they skewered the sacred cows of Soviet ideology and western civilization. During a brief interval in Israel they leavened the weight of religious tradition with irreverent performances and apocryphal tales. Unpredictable, unorthodox, unlike any other artists, Komar and Melamid have transformed into visual and verbal virtuosity their memories of pre-glasnost Russia and their experiences in the United States.
Summary of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid
Dubbed by one American critic, “exasperating expatriates”, Komar and Melamid gained their first taste of success – or notoriety – as underground artists who subverted the political and cultural systems of their native Soviet Union. They were founders of the Sots Art movement, a blend of Socialist Realism, Dada, Conceptualism and Pop Art, that parodied the propagandist culture of Stalinist communism. Having fully tested the patience of the Soviet authorities – “We have deconstructed Socialist Realism as an ideology and discovered it as an art,” declared Melamid – they were driven into exile in the United States where, to much initial acclaim, they retuned the dials of Sots Art to examine the delicacies of American art and society. Thought of firstly as cultural dissenters, their work allowed for a further layer of meaning to emerge through both men’s fascination with the vagaries of childhood memory.
“Whatever world they find themselves in is illuminated by the brilliant flashes of Komar and Melamid’s high-intensity wit. As dissident artists in Moscow they skewered the sacred cows of Soviet ideology and western civilization. During a brief interval in Israel they leavened the weight of religious tradition with irreverent performances and apocryphal tales. Unpredictable, unorthodox, unlike any other artists, Komar and Melamid have transformed into visual and verbal virtuosity their memories of pre-glasnost Russia and their experiences in the United States.”