Komar and Melamid /   Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid

December 27, 2014

Jasmine Lark

Alias of Jasmina Sevic, a researcher and author for Widewalls. She graduated from the Faculty of Political Science (Department for Journalism) in Belgrade in 2013.

Komar and Melamid is an tandem team of Russian conceptualist artists Vitaly Komar, born in 1943 and Alexander Melamid, born in 1945. They attended and graduated from the Stroganov School of Art and Design in 1967. Both artists were born in Moscow, but emigrated to Israel in 1977 and subsequently to New York in 1978.
In an artists’ statement they said that “even if only one of us creates some of the projects and works, we usually sign them together. We are not just an artist, we are a movement.”

Their first joint show, Retrospectivism, appeared in the Blue Bird Cafe, Moscow, in 1967.
During the late 60’s and early 70’s, Komar and Melamid found the movement that they called Sots Art, a unique version of Soviet Pop and Conceptual Art, which combines the principles of Dadaism and Socialist Realism. During these years, they also worked on Post-Art, pioneering multi-stylistical images prescient of post-modernism, which would become popular in the 80’s. They collaborated on various conceptual projects, ranging from painting and performance to installation, public sculpture, photography, music, and poetry. They also collaborated with other artists, for example, Douglas Davis, Fluxus member Charlotte Moorman, Andy Warhol, among others.

In 1973, they were expelled from the Youth section of the Soviet Artist Union. In 1974, duo was arrested during a performance in a Moscow apartment show and later their works, along with the works of other nonconformist artists, were destroyed by Soviet authorities at the open-door “Bulldozer Show.” In 1978, they moved to New York. Their first show in the West was at the Feldman Gallery, NY, in 1976, and first individual museum show was at the Hartford Athenaeum, Harford, USA, in 1978.

In the 80’s, they continued developing their Sots Art in works such as Nostalgic Socialist Realism Series, May 1st Installation at the Palladium Disco, and also Post-Art in works such as Diary Series, Anarchistic Synthesis Series, Bayonne, N.J. Series. They were the first Russian artists to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and also the first Russian artists to be invited to the Documenta 8, in Kassel, Germany, in 1987.

They devoted their projects in the 90’s to iconoclasm, democracy and elitism by statistics and ecology. Komar and Melamid’s most recent projects are devoted to art as a religion and to the synthesis of irony and spirituality.

They can be found in Oxford’s Dictionary of 20th Century Art, The Penguin Concise Dictionary of Art History, Art Since the 40’s, Bildende Kunst im 20 Jahrhundert, and Phaidon’s The 20th–Century Art Book.

Their works are included in the collections of Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and  Museum of Modern Art in New York, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Albertina, Vienna, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and San Francisco Museum of Art.

In 2004 the creative union of Komar and Melamid disbanded.