Russian Dreams – recent Russian Art at the Bass Museum

Private Moon, 2003-2005
© Leonid Tishkov & Boris Bendikov

 

Feathered Aggression, 2008
© Alexei Kostroma

Russian Dreams – recent Russian Art at the Bass Museum

Russian Dreams… presents a selection of cutting-edge works by contemporary artists from Russia. On view at the Bass Museum of Art from December 4, 2008 to February 8, 2009, the exhibition explores Russian art’s evolution from the pre-Glasnost era to the present day. Russian Dreams… is a collaboration between the Bass Museum of Art and the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow

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The exhibition juxtaposes the work of modern Russian artists: icons like AES+F Group, Alexander Ponomarev, Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov, Dmitri Gutov, Alexei Kostroma, and the new generation of young artists – Julia Milner, Rostan Tavasiev, Haim Sokol, and MishMash Project. The first group of artists came to prominence in the 1980-90s, the epoch of the Russian underground and Perestroika—Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of economic, political, and social restructuring which unintentionally catalyzed the toppling of Stalin’s totalitarian state. This was a time when Sotsart—a satiric blend of Socialist Realism and Pop Art that parodied official state-produced art—was the dominant artistic mode. The latter group of artists– currently between 20 and 30 years old – developed their work in a new, post-Perestroika Russia when government bans on personal expression were lifted, changing the scope of established artists’ work.

Many of the pieces in Russian Dreams are intimate, personal, narratives, while others look back, referencing the bolder Sotsart of Yuri Albert and Yuri Avvakumov who participated in the underground art movement during the Perestroika era. Today, after seventeen years of living in a new socio-economic reality, Russian Dreams… reflects ambivalence towards a lost Utopia, as well as a sense of contradiction and tension that is today’s twenty-first century Russia. The works in this exhibition resonate with the disconnected, random associations of dreams, and a sense of profound melancholy over what has been lost.

Russian Dreams… brings the latest in contemporary Russian painting, photography, video and installation art to Miami Beach, and explores the mindset of a new generation.