Vagrich Bakhchanyan, b.1938

Born in 1938, Bakhchanyan was a member of the Kharkov artistic circle, along with Eduard Limonov and Anatoly Brussilovsky. In 1960 he moved to Moscow where he became closely associated with a generation of Russian artists that pioneered Sots Art. Sots Art was an underground art movement in the Soviet Union that sought to deconstruct official Soviet art by means of parody. In the 1970s Bakhchanyan's drawings and collages were published in many periodicals and, as a result, greatly influenced the development of Russian conceptual and graphic art in the post-Stalinist period. In 1974, Bakhchanyan emigrated to the United States and, like many of his friends and colleagues, settled in New York. His artistic practice has somewhat changed and he gradually moved towards a more universal yet still highly conceptual approach. The Stalin Test exhibits this shift towards serial and performance orientated art typical in Bakhchanyan's later works, where he attempts to destroy Soviet society's reverence towards images of Stalin.