Igor Makarevich

Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell, "Igor Makarevich," Soviet Dissident Artists: Interviews after Perestroika, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995, pp. 285-93
A. Monastyrsky "I. Makarevich," A-Ya (Unofficial Russian Art Review), 1981, no. 3, pp. 31-33, illustrated
"Monumental'nyi Makarevich," Flash Art (Russian edition), Margarita and Victor Tupitsyn, eds., pp. 132-33
Gerald Pirog, "Unusual Perspectives/Fantastic Possibilities," interview with Igor Makarevich in Diane Neumaier, ed. Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 2004, pp. 279-91
Alla Rosenfeld, "Stretching the Limits: On Photo-Related Works of Art in the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection," in Diane Neumaier, ed. Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 2004, p. 147
Margarita Tupitsyn, Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present, Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1989, pp. 135, 137, 138
For related work, see Diane Neumaier, ed., Beyond Memory, fig. 120, and Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge, eds., From Gulag to Glasnost: Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, New York and London: Thames and Hudson and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 1995, 76, plate 4:30

Igor Makarevich is one of the most significant Moscow conceptual artists, creating objects, installations, and photographs. Makarevich lived in Georgia until 1951, and then moved to Moscow, where he attended the Moscow Art School from 1955 to 1962. In 1968, he graduated from the art department at the Moscow Institute of Cinematography.

Like many Moscow artists of the underground, Makarevich made his living illustrating books and creating theater designs. However, Makarevich could not exhibit his experimental works until the mid-1970s. In the late 1970s, Makarevich became a member of the Collective Actions group (1976-89) and took part in their performances, while also creating hyperrealist paintings and working in photography.

For Makarevich, photography has always been connected with conceptual art, and he was one of the first artists in Moscow to start using photography in this way. Makarevich's photo-series Stratigraphic Structures-Changes, of which Metamorphoses is a part, represents analytical research into the artist's own face and body as they slowly disappear under a gypsum mask. In 1977, Makarevich had a plaster cast made of his face for the work Twenty-Five Memories of My Friend. The artist noted that the several minutes it took for the lukewarm plaster paste to turn hard and cold as stone--during which time Makarevich was cut off from the outside world--served as a stimulus for his next work, Stratigraphic Structures-Changes (1978-79), located in the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconformist Art at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. Metamorphoses is a black-and-white, earlier version of the Zimmerli piece. It was executed in a more expressionistic manner, and some of the faces are erased. As described by Makarevich, the work depicts the mutation of a human face as it undergoes a series of transformations, from plaster mask to shattered substance, and is connected to the idea of a continuously changing mask beyond which lies the abyss. Each image forms a small box or cell enclosed within a massive frame. While the image inside each cell is constantly changing, the frame, alluding to a coffin, remains the same and symbolizes the limit of reality. The work encompasses dematerialization and annihilation, while the composition as a whole resembles an iconostasis, with the individual images appearing as icons.

The eternal cycle of birth and death is treated in Metamorphoses as a metaphor for the creative act. According to the artist, his thoughts had long been concerned with the theme of mortality--a subject forbidden in the context of official Soviet art, which was supposed to represent the optimistic and positive aspects of life. For Makarevich, the power of death was a most powerful force, one that took on the meaning of protest against the pompous optimism of Soviet official art.