Petr Belenok

Moscow, Bulldozer Exhibition, 1974

Petr Belenok, Artist's statement in Norma Roberts, ed., The Quest for Self-Expression: Painting in Moscow and Leningrad, 1965-1990, Columbus, Ohio: Columbus Museum of Art, 1990, p. 60
Norton Dodge and Alison Hilton, eds., New Art from the Soviet Union: The Known and the Unknown, Washington, D.C., and Mechanicsville, Md.: The Cremona Foundation and Acropolis Books Ltd., 1977, exhibition catalogue, pp. 37-38, figs. 70-71
Janet Kennedy, "Realism, Surrealism, and Photorealism: The Reinvention of Reality in Soviet Art of the 1970s and 1980s," in 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, pp. 278-79, fig. 13:6
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. 159

Mixed media on board. There are minor scratches and stains in some places, including a 2in. stain to the lower left. There is also a pinhole to each corner, and minor paint loss to the corners and edges. Craquelure (possibly original) is present in some places. Under UV pigment fluoresces in the hair of the man fourth from right on the ground.
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Petr Belenok, who died prematurely at the age of fifty-three, was a nonconformist artist who masterfully explored the possibilities of collage in the early 1970s. In 1967, having graduated from the Kiev Art Institute's department of sculpture Belenok moved to Moscow. There, he soon became a member of the group of unofficial artists that had formed around the studio of Oscar Rabin. In 1974, he was among the organizers of and a participant in the infamous "Bulldozer Exhibition" held on the outskirts of Moscow.

A sculptor by profession, Belenok often earned his living by producing busts of Lenin. However, in his spare time he created highly expressive semi-abstract and phantasmagoric compositions that included figurative elements. Belenok combined collages of figures cut out from various magazines and miniaturized in an endless space with a rapid brushstroke typical of Abstract Expressionism.

Belenok's work is related to Cosmism, a philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in Russia in the early twentieth century whose main proponents were the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov (1828-1903); Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), the father of Soviet cosmonautics; and Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945), a pioneer in biogeochemistry. Combining elements of religion and ethics, Russian Cosmism deals with the history and philosophy of the origin, evolution, and future existence of the universe and humankind. It explains historical, social, and psychological processes in terms of the influences of cosmic energies and asserts a reciprocal dependency of the fate of the universe on the activity of the human mind. Referring to his works that suggest cataclysmic forces and alienation, Belenok explained: "I am not interested in the minute observations of life; I observe the world and its problems from a detached position in space."