Mushroom Cloud Image by Marat Guelman & Plus-Minus Komma

Ethan Cohen Gallery

As conditions in Russia begin to resemble the end of the Soviet era, threads of connectivity from that time to this become doubly prescient. The parallels are unmistakable: the Afghan and Ukraine wars, economic meltdown, increased censorship, communications isolation, multiplying dissenting voices despite severe crackdowns, and much else. Hitherto non-existent popular criticism of the Kremlin and its system is visibly emerging across Russia on social media. There was a time in the late Soviet and early Putin era when such criticism found prominent cultural and artistic expression, often achieving recognition abroad. Arguably its most historic names - Vitaly Komar and Marat Guelman - are now on exhibit until May 30 at a top New York art venue, in the Ethan Cohen Gallery’s two separate locations in Manhattan.

Marat Guelman and Vitaly Komar, the widely celebrated figures in question, each have their one-man shows on 17th street and 19th street respectively. Guelman began his vocation as a curator of artistic defiance with the famed dissenting Sots-Art movement in Moscow that launched a group show outside in the fields - which the authorities notoriously shut down using bulldozers which became known as the ‘Bulldozer Show”. The year was 1974, the height of the Cold War. Video of it was shown on newscasts around the world.

Among others, that event featured the artistic duo of Komar and Melamid, who subsequently came to the US in 1978 and became household names after their debut at the famed Ronald Feldman gallery. They split up some 20 years ago and the current Vitaly Komar solo show at the Ethan Cohen Gallery is titled “Three Day Weekend: Tomorrow Is not Guaranteed”. Guelman, for his part, has been a curator and gallerist recently turned artist. His show of work done in collaboration with the art collective Plus-Minus Komma is titled “First Of All It’s Beautiful”.

Guelman opened his first gallery in 1990s Moscow where he quickly became an outspoken public figure. Between 2009 - 2013 he ran a contemporary art museum in the town of Perm about a day’s drive from the capital. Under him, the museum tended towards political art and Guelman soon found himself in trouble with the authorities as the Putin era became increasingly repressive. He was close to other leading public dissidents such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Garry Kasparov. In 2013, the museum’s show critical of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Russia, was censored and closed down.

Guelman then focused on his curatorial and gallery activities in Moscow until the invasion of Crimea in 2014 when he realized it was no longer possible to live or work in the country and moved to Berlin. He had already been the target of sustained harassment for some years. The New York gallerist Ethan Cohen remembers how, back in 2007, he visited Guelman’s gallery where an opposition leader was giving a speech. The event was quickly surrounded by secret police. Says Cohen, “Inside, ultra-rightist agitators made a violent scene, shouting, shoving and throwing books at the speaker. We all thought it was an assassination attempt and everybody hit the floor. Then the police came in and shut the place down”.

More recently in 2024, living in Berlin, Guelman was warned by the local authorities that he might need police protection. He had been officially dubbed an extremist and terrorist by the Russians. The kind of notoriety that often gets you assassinated by Kremlin thugs in Europe. Before that he was branded a foreign agent by Russia’s Ministry of Justice in 2021 and put on the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Federal Wanted List in 2022.

His show is a series of deliberately beautiful AI-rendered mushroom cloud images in styles ranging from Old Masters to Impressionists to Jackson Pollock and beyond. “Putin had just threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine,” says Guelman. “How are you supposed to react? Well, it’s obviously a fear mongering intimidation tactic. He wants all his critics including me to be scared and stay silent. The right response was to reject that fear publicly. So this show is the response.”

Guelman knew the art duo Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid back in the pre-Perestroika era of free speech expansion. Komar and Melamid developed their iconoclastic art ethos as a response to state and religious symbols deployed to keep the populace in subjection. The current show is what Komar calls a ‘distillation’ of his work, especially in the solo phase. Here we view the chronicle of a renowned artist’s philosophical and esthetic arc towards a reconciliation with a life spent wrestling public issues.

The legendary partnership of Komar and Melamid effectively ceased collaborating some 20 years ago. They had made history in the Soviet Union as part of the caustically dissident underground art movement, then migrated to New York via Israel in 1978. Here they promptly found ways to provoke the public eye with a debut show at the famed Ronald Feldman gallery, regularly flouting the review pages of the New York Times over the years. “We are a not a team; we are a movement” was a resounding quote that echoed convincingly through their era of prominence.

Their dance with history, the history of symbols, their flirting against authority, including the traditional Russian worship of religious icons which Stalin very deliberately transmuted into Socialist poster art, became a subversive skepticism toward all faith without doubt. In America, they recognized echoes of propaganda art and the presence of false gods in popular consumerist imagery. And so, in the 1990s, they launched ‘The People’s Choice’ project dedicated to envisioning art based on data from popular polls in countries across the world. This too was a response to state power as experienced under the Soviet Union and its spurious use of statistics for control, not least of free speech and artistic expression.

In the end the duo diverged according to their true instincts. Melamid’s Duchampian rejectionism led to honorable stasis and withdrawal. Komar’s exploration of corrupted worship symbols continued. Komar’s works are never private or merely personal. His oeuvre did, after all, begin with the satirizing of Soviet propaganda posters. Hence the depiction of Putin, Trump, and Xi as the ironic substitutes for Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in ‘The New Yalta’, a de-sublimated vision of the famous original photograph.

Komar’s art has always functioned as subversion of any art used for brainwashing, what in today’s parlance would be ‘disinformation’, and the dangers of its public misuse - prostration before the icon as it miscegenates into the iconic. His works were first born when totalitarian control of imagery was the rule in Russia. His celebration of free expression by warning against its muzzling and distortion comes back to haunt us, above all in his country of origin where the old conditions return and his struggles take on a grim new relevance.