“Thinking Pictures”: Moscow Conceptual Art in the Dodge Collection

“Thinking Pictures” draws on one of the great strengths of the Dodge Collection: the visually provocative objects that distinguish Moscow Conceptualism from the forms associated with its namesake, the canonical oeuvres of American and British conceptual artists, in particular. This exhibition focuses on more than 40 individual artists and several collectives who lived and worked in Soviet Moscow from the 1960s to the 1990s. They were concerned with the essential task of creating an audience in an environment that lacked galleries, critics, and a viable art market, but had its own institutional framework that privileged painting (Socialist Realism).

The exhibition presents a diverse range of artworks by several generations of artists who responded to the experience of ideological conformity (and its dissolution), as it had been enforced within official art academies. They were oriented toward irony and parody, but also toward serious speculation about the place of the individual in Soviet society and Western art history. The term “thinking pictures” (umozritel’naia zhivopis’) was coined by artists in the late 1970s to capture the new role that painting played in the post-conceptual era.

“Thinking Pictures” introduces contemporary audiences to these artists’ historical gambit. Although exhibitions devoted to the Moscow Conceptualist circle have been organized in Europe and Russia, “Thinking Pictures” is the first in the United States since Perspectives of Conceptualism in 1991. The exhibition features work by widely recognized artists (Eric Bulatov Ilya Kabakov, Komar and Melamid, Viktor Pivovarov), as well as such others at the center of this movement as Yuri Albert, Yuri Leiderman, Igor Makarevich, and Irina Nakhova.

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

The exhibition and accompanying publication are made possible by the Avenir Foundation Endowment Fund, the Dodge Charitable Trust, The Thickman Family Foundation, and by donors to the Zimmerli's Major Exhibition Fund: James and Kathrin Bergin; Alvin and Joyce Glasgold; Charles and Caryl Sills; Voorhees Family Endowment; and the Jerome A. Yavitz Charitable Foundation, Inc.-Stephen Cypen, President