Komar and Melamid

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid are most widely recognized as the originators of the Sots Art movement in the 1970s, in which they satirized Soviet culture by adapting the ideological style of Socialist Realism and parodying the heroic figures of the Soviet state. The collaborative pair has created various conceptual projects, ranging from painting and performance to installation, public sculpture, photography, and poetry. They have also collaborated with contemporary Western artists, including Andy Warhol, Douglas Davis, and the Fluxus member Charlotte Moorman.

In 1973, Komar and Melamid were expelled from the youth section of the Union of Soviet Artists, having been charged with "distortion of Soviet reality and deviation from the principles of Soviet Realism" by Soviet officials. In 1974 they were arrested during their performance in a private apartment in Moscow. Later that same year, works by Komar and Melamid as well as other nonconformist artists were destroyed by Soviet authorities at the open-air show that came to be known as the "Bulldozer Exhibition." The artists left the Soviet Union for Israel in 1977, and in 1978 they moved to New York. Their first exhibition in the West took place at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York in 1976. Since their immigration to the United States, Komar and Melamid have shifted focus to such topics as the critique of commercialism and capitalism. In one of their major conceptual projects the artists took an ironic look at the art preferences of average citizens in various countries.

After immigration, they became the first Russian artists to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982) and to be invited to participate in Documenta, exhibiting at Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany, in 1987.

In 1973, Komar and Melamid created the polyptych Biography of a Contemporary, which combines a multitude of styles, from erotic realism to expressionist and geometric abstraction. In 1984, the artists returned to conceptual eclecticism with their Anarchistic Synthesis series. Featuring diptychs, triptychs, and polyptychs in a range of styles borrowed from the entire history of Western painting, Anarchistic Synthesis deconstructs historical and art-historical categories. Melamid has explained: "When we paint in a certain style—we've painted in many styles in our lifetime—it is not only about style. It is about our history with that style. It's a curved mirror."

Between January and April of 1985, Komar and Melamid made more than fifty paintings in this series. The following year, the Ronald Feldman Gallery presented forty-one of these works in the exhibition Anarchistic Synthesism. The two present lots, Footsteps on the Stairs and Composition with Missiles (Landscape Inspired by Rothko), belong to the Anarchistic Synthesis series.

The triptych Composition with Missiles (Landscape Inspired by Rothko) is one of Komar and Melamid's most impressive works. It includes various objects of everyday use, images of missiles, and a soaring figure in the sky. The work's pastiche of various styles, subjects, and cultures reveals the fluid nature of the canonical narratives of history and art history. According to Melamid: "From a structural viewpoint, any work can be broken down into cells: brushstroke, blob of paint, color, line, etc. Our smallest cell is style. For us, style is as tiny as the brushstroke is for the painter. So, for us, a particular set of styles is like a particular set of brushstrokes."

The first panel of Composition with Missiles, with its grid-like format  housing various mundane objects, is reminiscent of Russian hagiographical icons. The second panel was inspired by the work of the Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko (1903-70). It features a few softly modulated rectangles of color that seem to float above one another on a colored ground, dematerializing both surfaces and contours. In his works, Rothko "alluded to how human life grows and perishes and ebbs and flows against a continuum of nature." Rothko often stressed that his work represented the transcendental; the theme of man's vulnerability and mortality was important for him. By inserting images of missiles into this otherwise abstract composition, Komar and Melamid explore complex ideas concerning the fate of humanity.

Like the first panel, the second and third panels of Composition with Missiles may also be interpreted in terms of Christian iconography, in this case because of their colors—reddish purple and blue. Blue, the most immaterial of all the colors, is the definitive color of the heavens. The blue panel with a soaring figure expresses detachment from this world and the soul's ascent to God. The flying figure also symbolizes the desire to overcome the prosaic realm of everyday life, as metaphorically presented in the object-filled first panel. By contrast, reddish purple is suggestive of death (among other connotations, including those of royalty and wealth); it is therefore not accidental that the panel depicting missiles was rendered in this color.

With its rich layering of associations, symbols, and signs within a work that combines figuration with abstraction, Composition with Missiles suggests the internal and external human environment and its fateful cycle.