Victor Pivovarov

Victor Pivovarov, Artist's statements, A-Ya, 1984, no. 6, pp. 18-23
Sonja and Angels, Prague: Gallery Rudolphinum, 1996, exhibition catalogue
Victor Pivovarov, Vliublennyi agent, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001
Yekaterina Dyogot, Dorothee Bienert, and Pavel Nedoma, Victor Pivovarov: Shagi mekhanika, 2004

Watercolor and gouache on paper. The paper is loosely affixed to a board and shows signs of slight buckling. The surface is a little dirty and there are smudges to the outer edges. There are also some very minor stains. Held in a modern frame and under glass. Unexamined out of frame.
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After graduating from the Moscow Polygraphic Institute in 1962, Victor Pivovarov began a successful career as an illustrator and designer of children's books. Children's book illustration was an area of relative creative freedom in the Soviet Union, one that permitted artists to experiment without being constrained by the same dogmatic Socialist Realist restrictions imposed on painting as a form of "high" art. Alongside book illustration, Pivovarov gradually started working on a conceptual series of drawings and paintings, linking his works to literary forms such as short stories, poems, diaries, and novels.

The group of Leningrad absurdist writers of the 1920s-1930s known as OBERIU was an important influence on Pivovarov's oeuvre. So, too was the visual language of children's drawings and forms of "anonymous street production" like the instruction manual and the billboard. Pivovarov has written that he developed a type of picture incorporating the aesthetics of such forms that share the following characteristics: an economical, condensed, and detached way of expressing ideas; an impersonal style; and a quality of alienation, the sense of a distance between the author and his work. All of these features can be found in these drawings.