A Vibrant Field: Nature and Landscape in Soviet Nonconformist Art, 1970s-1980s

A Vibrant Field: Nature and Landscape in Soviet Nonconformist Art, 1960s-1980s is the first exhibition at the Zimmerli to explore the wide range of meanings that the natural world held for unofficial artists in the Soviet Union. Drawn from the Dodge Collection, the exhibition brings together works that challenged the link between nature, optimism, and progress, which socialist realist aesthetics had promoted.

Approximately fifty objects are featured, including paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photography, and performances, by more than twenty-five artists and artist groups from the Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine. Despite the artists’ diverse backgrounds and creative approaches, together their works establish nature as a vibrant subject matter, push the boundaries of landscape as a genre, and limit the appropriation of landscape imagery in the name of socialist ideology. In turn, the status of nature, and one’s individual or collective place within it, is explored as an open—and vital—question. 

A Vibrant Field is mapped along three zones of inquiry, assembling varied perspectives that underlie how one experiences nature, both in the physical sense of navigating nature as a real environment and in the conceptual sense of assigning it symbolic value. Visions takes to task the process of visualizing spaces in nature to evaluate how humans relate to or inhabit them. In Reflections, artists place less emphasis on the material landscapes than on how they become a picture. Finally, Encounters considers the emergence of land art and performance-based practices in nature that provided a freer alternative to urban communality, ritual, and public space in the Soviet Union.

Organized by Anna Rogulina, a Dodge-Lawrence Fellow at the Zimmerli and Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at Rutgers

The exhibition and brochure are made possible by the Avenir Foundation Endowment Fund, The Thickman Family Foundation, and the Dodge Charitable Trust – Nancy Ruyle Dodge, Trustee.