Monumental in its scale and visual impact, Sky and Sea is a quintessential example of Bulatov’s late Soviet period. It is a visual embodiment of the main theoretical questions Bulatov addressed in his work from the late 1950s onwards, when, still a student at the Surikov State Art Institute, he first met the avant-garde painter Robert Falk and the wood engraver and theoretician Vladimir Favorsky. By the late 1950s, these artists were operating on the fringes of the official art world, victims of the anti-formalist campaigns of the 1930s. Yet their influence was still immense and many future representatives of the non-conformist movement were keen to learn from them.

Speaking about Falk’s and Favorsky’s approaches and contrasting them to official Soviet art, Bulatov explained: ‘As for the type of [pictorial] space these two artists worked with, Falk […] employed the ‘artwork-as-a-window’ system, yet the space in his work was very much structured and, of course, not at all illusionistic. […] In turn, in his engravings and drawings, Favorsky employed the concept of the ‘artwork-as-a-relief’…’ (Erik Bulatov. Zhivu dal’she: stat’i, interv’iu, Moscow: Artist. Rezhisser. Teatr, 2009, p.41). Comparing his own practice to that of his two mentors, Bulatov continued: ‘I, in turn, always tried to simultaneously employ both types of pictorial space organisation. […] I always wanted to construct the space of an artwork in such a way that it would be developing in two directions away from the pictorial surface: towards the viewer and into the depth of the artwork’ (ibid., p.42). The key objective of painting for Bulatov was to give the viewer an opportunity to step into a different space beyond one he or she physically inhabited, with depicted objects either assisting or obstructing the viewer’s movement (ibid., p.35).

An early work illustrating this concept is Horizon (1971-72), where the viewer is transported into the depth of the painting along with a group of Soviet citizens marching toward the sea. Yet, the ribbon of the Order of Lenin, which Bulatov positions on the surface of the artwork, covers the horizon line and obstructs this movement. It is also the first work where the motif of the sea and sky is featured, symbolising freedom from the confines and restrictions of the social space in which he existed and worked.

Words start appearing in Bulatov’s paintings towards the mid-1970s, with Glory to the CPSU from 1975 being an important early example of this instrument used to organise the pictorial space (fig.1). According to the artist, ‘…the word is addressed to the viewer. And its position between the painting and the viewer gives it an opportunity to command the space’ (ibid., p.42). In line with Bulatov’s distinction between his mentors’ methods, the letters become the relief, the sky the window, and the painting’s surface the border between the two (ibid., p.44). At first, the letters seem to overwhelm the viewer with their scale and colour, appearing to move towards the viewer and preventing him to see anything beyond their bulk. As the viewer continues looking at the work, he or she is able to shift their vision beyond the letters and the surface of the artwork and reach into the depth of the sky, that is, become liberated from the social space made up of the letters and what they represent.

Similarly, in Sky and Sea the letters command the movement of the viewer’s gaze both outwards, into the physical space occupied by the viewer, and inwards, into the depth of the painting, the two words merging towards the horizon line. The words form a grid, which, at first, prevents the viewer’s full engagement with the idyllic, meditative landscape in the background. Yet just like in Glory to the CPSU and other works from the 1970s-1980s, the viewer’s vision gradually shifts, allowing the passage beyond the painting’s surface and granting an escape into the nature’s eternity. Interesting here is the additional conceptual interplay between the words and their visual representation. It brings Bulatov’s work into proximity with Western conceptual art practice, in particular the work of artists such as Joseph Kosuth, which he is known to have seen during the 1970s (Yu.Albert (ed.), Moskovskii kontseptualizm. Nachalo, Nizhny Novgorod: Privolzhskii filial Gosudarstvennogo tsentra sovremennogo iskusstva, 2014, pp.40-41).

Sky and Sea was included in Bulatov’s first exhibition outside the Soviet Union which took place in Zurich in 1988, and later travelled to France, the UK and the USA. The work has been exhibited on numerous occasions since then, including the artist’s major retrospective at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 2006. It is without a doubt one of the most impressive oils by Bulatov ever to appear at auction, presenting a rare opportunity to acquire a work of this calibre by a living legend of Soviet non-conformism.

_{Interview with Erik Bulatov in advance of his 2017 installation at Tate Modern in London}