Paintings and Mixed-media works
- Three-Day Weekend
- Paintings of the sixties and seventies
August 11 - September 10, 2005
Thursday-Friday, 12.00-18.00; Saturday 12.00-16.00
Review of Three-Day Weekend at Ronald Feldman, New York, in ARTFORUM
Vitaly Komar’s show bridges the artist’s career, from rare early works, shown originally in Moscow in the sixties, to his most recent series, Three-Day Weekend. These apparently disparate works, separated by nearly forty years, veil a striking consistency of outlook.
Three Day Weekend refers to the different days of rest of the Muslims, Jews and Christians. Komar in his artist's statement is not merely proposing a shorter working week: he is arguing for a culturally inclusive society. The artworks reference the mandala (an ancient image of unity) and other religious imagery; and incorporate personal and historical references: to the Yalta Conference (1945), when Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt carved up Europe; and to Komar’s own childhood, specifically to his parents’ doomed Christian-Jewish marriage. The healing image of the mandala and other religious symbols (the star, the cross, the crescent) are imposed on these ‘fragile unities’ that cracked under the pressure of conflicting value-systems.
Komar is best known as part of the duo Komar and Melamid, who brought the world sots-art (the primary underground art movement in the USSR in the seventies), Nostalgic Socialist Realism (surveyed at MOMA, Oxford, in the eighties) and the People’s Choice series of paintings, based on a world-wide opinion poll, in the nineties. The Komar-Melamid partnership dissolved last year, and Three Day Weekend is Komar’s first solo project since the split. Works from this series were shown at Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, in July (see attached ArtForum review) and are exhibited concurrently at the Ben Uri Gallery, London.*
Komar’s early works, one of which is exhibited for the first time since Komar’s one-day show at Moscow’s Bluebird Cafe in 1967, are discussed by the artist in a video interview that accompanies the exhibition. The interview reveals Komar’s consistent interest in an inclusive culture. He makes it clear that the early paintings came out of the idealistic melting pot of Moscow bohemianism, when a Jew might practice Buddhism, a Muslim be baptized into the Orthodox faith - and a dissident artist feel sympathy for the ferocious purity of Socialist Realism. Based on motifs by Shvarts, for example, is Komar's take, satirical yet undeniably envious, on the masters of Socialist Realism: a hero of the Soviet ideology rides out to do battle, watched by his nomenklatura 'princess'.
Glory to Labour is a rare example of Sotsart, the movement created by Komar and Melamid in the early seventies to satirise official Soviet painting.
Forty years have elapsed since Komar painted Three eggs in an oval niche, which was part of a project he called 'Retrospectivism': an attempt to build a bridge to pre-avant-garde art. As he has put it, looking back on the evolution of Russian art since the sixties: 'I never imagined that my artist friends and I would be transformed from the so-called avant-garde of spiritual and intellectual life to the avant-garde of real estate.'
* Ben Uri Gallery, The London Jewish Museum of Art, 108a Boundary Road, NW8 ORH. Tel. 020 7604 3991 www.benuri.org.uk
Matthew Bown Gallery
First floor
11 Savile Row
London
W1S 3PG
t. +44 20 7734 4790
f. +44 20 7734 4791
e. mail@matthewbown.com
Three-Day Weekend
Artist’s Statement
by Vitaly Komar
The Three-Day Weekend, for me, is a symbol of the peaceful coexistence of different peoples and different concepts of faith and spirituality: Friday for Muslims, Saturday for Jews, and Sunday for Christians. The idea to create ecumenical symbols in the form of Universal Mandalas originated in childhood dreams. It continues the search of the nonconformist art of my youth. In these mandalas, I unite ancient symbols of spirituality with historical and personal images.
My imagination unites images and concepts that are distant and seemingly opposite. I first saw a picture of the Yalta Conference, an image that was banned in the Soviet Union, in the 1980s in New York. Afterwards, for many years I could not understand why I was so haunted by it. Back then, I made several paintings on this theme. In the first, I transformed Roosevelt’s face into the face of ET – a child and alien in America who is from another planet and possibly a different political system.
Two years ago, while looking through old family photographs, I rediscovered a portrait of me with my mother and father that was my favorite in childhood but which I have long since forgotten. My father is dressed in his military uniform. It was taken shortly after the end the Second World War, and it was the last time that the three of us were together. I was six, my parents would soon be divorced, and my father would shortly leave Moscow. I never saw him again.
When I saw this portrait, I suddenly thought about the image of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. Placing these two photographs side by side, I realized that the picture of Yalta had haunted me because unconsciously I saw in it a forgotten picture of my family. In the depths of my memory, these two trinities had become superimposed. I understood also that the image of ET in my old painting was a self-portrait; it was me – a Russian Jew, an alien from a different world.
The main reason for my parents’ divorce was that the Jewish traditions of my mother’s family could not coexist peacefully with my father’s Christian ones. For me, these two photographs became a symbol of a fragile unity— the unity of the Allies just before the Cold War, and of my family not long before my parents’ divorce. An old, naïve dream of a happy family, of peaceful coexistence between peoples, ethnic groups and religions, came back to me through these pictures.
During my Soviet childhood, a weekend lasted only one day – Sunday. This caused a great deal of hardship for my Jewish grandparents, who had difficultly obtaining permission to move their free day from Sunday to Saturday. After Stalin’s death, the government instituted a two-day weekend. I was a teenager then, but even now, the two-day weekend – Saturday and Sunday – seems to me a symbol of the peaceful coexistence of Judaism and Christianity. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, to add one more flower to this bouquet – Friday – to include Abdul, my Tartar classmate, whose Muslim family lived in our building?
These visions and dreams were typical of our small circle of nonconformist artists, the friends of my youth. We would drink, recite poetry, and talk about Sots Art (Soviet pop/conceptual art) and dukhovka (spiritual questions) until sunrise. Sots Art was a kind of ironical iconoclasm, whereas dukhovka, a slang expression of Moscow’s bohemia, expressed a dream of an ecumenical mysticism. I’ve always loved Gogol’s cocktail of irony and mysticism. In the beginning of the 1970s, in a multi-stylistic installation called Paradise, Alex Melamid and I tried to combine Sots Art and dukhovka in one, synthetic work. I dreamed of making symbols that united heraldry and mandalas, irony and spirituality, symbols that would genuinely represent the peaceful coexistence of peoples and religions, something that the state emblems—the hammer and sickle, the various state eagles—did not actually accomplish. Unfortunately, Paradise, which was housed in my father-in-law’s apartment, was dismantled on the orders of state authorities.
We were constantly surrounded by Soviet pop culture—state-sponsored official art and visual propaganda. Publications, exhibitions, and sales of art were controlled by the Soviet government. Under these circumstances, pursuing money and fame meant selling your soul to the devil. Out of principle, many of us chose to make our living as something other than artists. We made art “for the soul,” during free time on weekends. The two days seemed so short that I dreamed of having at least one more “creative day.” My utopia of the three-day weekend was dangerous. This idea could have united people more effectively than Marxism. The idea of the peaceful coexistence of different ideologies was viewed by the government as anti-Soviet propaganda. The common enemy of totalitarian atheistic fundamentalism united us with various dissident groups. I think that Hitler, the common enemy, united the superstars of the Yalta conference in a similar way. In the future, friends, not enemies, must bring us together.
The search for spirituality in art, begun by Kandinsky during the flowering of the Russian avant-garde, was interrupted first by Stalin, and later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, by the advent of the capitalist free market. I never imagined that my artist friends and I would be transformed from the so-called avant-garde of spiritual and intellectual life to the avant-garde of real estate. At the beginning of the 21st century, both in Russia and in the West, we have gained much, but have forgotten much too, just as I had forgotten my childhood photograph.
Nostalgia for the nonconformist art of my youth made me return to its unfulfilled dreams and experiments. A painting of ET was part of the Nostalgic Socialist Realism series, made with my old friend Alex. But when I began uniting symbols of spirituality with childhood photographs of me and my parents, I embarked on a deeply personal work. Today, I understand the concept of artistic collaboration very broadly. I continue to collaborate with art history, with the nonconformist art of my youth.
The exhibition and publication of these symbols will be the initial step in the creation and promotion of a not-for-profit Three-Day Weekend Society.
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Vitaly Komar talks to Matthew Bown about his early career in Moscow and about his painting Three eggs in an oval niche, 1965 (QuickTime, duration 9' 28", size 30.9 Mb) |
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From the series 'Three-Day Weekend': Yalta Conference at the Jewish Cemetery II, 2005 Mixed media, 40 x 30 in. |
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From the series 'Three-Day Weekend': Ouroboros inside hourglasses, 2005 Mixed media, 40 x 30 in. |
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From the series 'Three-Day Weekend': Later I understood why the photograph of the Yalta Conference had attracted me III, 2005 Mixed media, 40 x 30 in. |
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From the series 'Three-Day Weekend': Later I understood why the photograph of the Yalta Conference had attracted me I, 2005 Mixed media, 40 x 30 in. |
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(In the Bluebird cafe) Space/niche around a drunk, 1971 Oil on canvas mounted on board, 23 x 19.5 in. |
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Based on motifs by Shvarts, 1965 Oil on canvas mounted on board, 25.5 x 19.5 in. |
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From the series 'Retrospectivism', exhibited at the Bluebird cafe, Moscow, 1967: Three eggs in an oval niche, 1965 Oil on canvas mounted on board, 19 x 14 in. |
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From the series 'Sotsart': Glory to Labour, 1971 Oil on canvas, 39 x 34 in. |
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