Vitaly Komar (born 1943, Moscow) and Alexander Melamid (born 1945, Moscow) are a Moscow-born conceptualist duo who, in 1972, co-founded Sots Art — a movement that turned the visual language of Soviet Socialist Realism against itself by fusing it with the irony of Western Pop Art. Working together from the mid-1960s until 2003, they became two of the most internationally recognised figures to emerge from Soviet unofficial art.
From the Bulldozer Exhibition to New York
In 1974 the pair took part in the open-air show near Moscow that the authorities destroyed with bulldozers and water cannon — the event remembered as the Bulldozer Exhibition — and their Double Self-Portrait (1974) was among the works lost. They emigrated to Israel in 1977 and settled in New York in 1978, becoming United States citizens in 1988. Their thirty-six-year artistic partnership ended in 2003.
Notable works
- Double Self-Portrait (1974)
- I Saw Stalin Once When I Was a Child (1981–82) — in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York
- The Origin of Socialist Realism (1982–83)
- Scenes from the Future: Guggenheim Museum (1990) — Museum of Modern Art, New York
- America’s Most Wanted and America’s Most Unwanted Painting (1994), from their poll-driven project The People’s Choice
- When Elephants Paint (from 1998), shown at the Venice Biennale in 1999
Exhibitions and collections
Komar and Melamid’s work is held by the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate in London, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and was shown at Documenta in 1987. The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University — home of the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection, the largest holding of Soviet nonconformist art anywhere — presented the retrospective Komar and Melamid: A Lesson in History in 2023.
As founders of Sots Art, Komar and Melamid stand among the defining voices of postwar Russian and Eastern-European art — the field this foundation was established to preserve and present.