Drawing from the Zimmerli’s rarely shown large scale artworks from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection, Painting to Scale explores the constraints on access to materials that underpin narratives of “nonconformism” in the USSR. Artists from diverse republics managed to work either in large scale serial formats or single images, often painted in oil on canvas, despite the very real limits on space and access to exhibition spaces that characterized their professional lives. By highlighting important artworks that were painted/created on a large, sometimes monumental scale, the exhibition underscores the ambitions and confidence expressed by artists who, paradoxically, may rarely have had an opportunity to present them to a larger public. It suggests the need for a more nuanced and ambivalent view of professional access and accommodation in the underground artworld than has been typically presented.

A section of the exhibition will include a selection of works that focus on the artist’s identity, national and symbolic, depicted through traditional—figurative—and abstract representational forms. The second area addresses nature, whether by emphasizing its artifice or evoking a desired proximity to it; the third highlights the allegorical and duplicitous strategies that were shared by artists despite a diversity of visual modes.

Organized by Jane Sharp, Research Curator for Soviet Nonconformist Art.

Generous support for bilingual text was provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program.