Dmitri Plavinsky (Дмитрий Плавинский, 1937–2012) was a founding figure of the 1960s Soviet nonconformist movement and the originator of a personal style he called “Structural Symbolism,” preoccupied with ancient texts, prehistoric life, relics and decay. A 1956 graduate of the theatre department of the 1905 Institute of Art, he was refused membership of the Moscow Union of Artists until 1978.
Texts, relics and grass
Plavinsky’s “Book of Grass” cycle, begun in 1963, combined botanical ink drawings with monotype imprints of real plants; his later work layered scripts, maps and archaeological motifs into dense symbolic surfaces. He moved to New York in 1992 and returned to Moscow in 2004.
Collections
His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which holds Manhattan Fish, 1992), the Museum of Modern Art, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin Museum, the State Russian Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. The Tretyakov gave him a retrospective in 2004 and the Pushkin Museum showed “Book of Grass” in 2015.