Breaking the Ice: Moscow Art, 1960-80s, Saatchi Gallery, SW3 - review

 
13 December 2012

While Charles Saatchi’s recent forays into contemporary Russian art occupy the two lower floors of his gallery, above them is a huge show which reflects what happened before. Often made under the radar, the experiments of Moscow-based artists between the Sixties and Eighties and then in the immediately post-Soviet era offer a fascinating complement to Saatchi’s latest acquisitions and an intriguing counterpoint to western art of the same epoch.

The works are not from Saatchi’s collection but gathered from public and private collections by the Tsukanov Family Foundation. Many loosely relate to concurrent western movements and groups—abstract expressionism, pop art, conceptual art — but the repressive conditions in the Soviet Union prompted different content and methods.

Revolutionary Russia had been a hotbed of radical art, particularly in the suprematist and constructivist abstraction of Kasimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko. But the Stalinist clampdown on modern art in 1932 meant the leaden figuration of socialist realism became the state style.

The early rooms reflect the efforts to re-explore those modernist traditions after Stalin’s death, and it proves fascinating rather than particularly impressive — the abstraction of Lydia Masterkova and Vladimir Nemukhin, for instance, is heroic in an atmosphere of censorship but modest compared to what was happening in post-war America and France.

The show’s second half, however, is superb. It is dominated by two movements: sots art, an irreverent mix of pop and socialist realism, and Moscow conceptualism. Mischievous humour pervades the work. The duo Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid are shown in depth, from their early, deliberately slapdash satires of Soviet propaganda to a later group of Nostalgic Socialist Realist Paintings, scorning the approved aesthetic style and the imagery of the Soviet state. The mockery is not reserved for officialdom — the ideals of the avant garde are lampooned as suprematist designs adorn urinals in Alexander Kosolapov’s Russian Revolutionary Porcelain (1989-90), a nod to the failure of Russian modernism and a wink at Marcel Duchamp. With around 200 works, the show feels cluttered in places but it is thoroughly engaging — a tale of radical art finding a way back from Stalinist decimation.

Until February 24 (020 7811 3070, saatchigallery.com).

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