Vitaly Komar Vitaly Komar's "Allegories of Justice"

art agenda May 17, 2015

"Komar’s recent exhibition at New York’s Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, “Allegories of Justice,” which includes a few earlier works by the former team, raises a number of questions. What happens when an artist duo splits up, as Komar & Melamid did? What happens when the context of any artist’s production—in this case conceptual sociopolitical work satirically skewering both Soviet ideology and American consumerism—vanishes into thin air, as the Soviet system did, leaving them and other Soviet artists without a framework? And how do they continue to make art in the context of the internal void of a suddenly collapsed culture? Also, in the case of Komar & Melamid—who left Moscow in 1977 and moved to New York the next year—how was their work affected by the external disruptions of emigration to a diametrically opposite society?"

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