Igor Makarevich

Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell, "Igor Makarevich," in Soviet Dissident Artists: Interviews after Perestroika, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995, pp. 285-293
A. Monastyrsky, "I. Makarevich," A-Ya (Unofficial Russian Art Review), 1981, no. 3, pp. 31-33
"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, 279-291
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, p. 147
Margarita Tupitsyn, Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present, Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1989, pp. 135, 137, 138
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.290, fig. 220 (a related work illustrated)

Tempera on canvas. The canvas is a bit rough in some places and thin in others. The surface is a little dirty and there are some possible minor stains, but this work is in overall good condition. Under UV the composition appears untouched. Sold unframed.
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Igor Makarevich is one of the most important Moscow conceptual artists who creates objects, installations, and photographs. He 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, he could not exhibit his experimental works until the mid-1970s, when he showed his works at Exhibitions, a club for sculptors. He was allowed to display his works there only because the organization was supervised by a liberal unit of the Union of Soviet Artists, headed by the poet and artist Dmitri Prigov. 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.

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, death was a powerful force, one that took on the meaning of protest amid the pompous optimism of Soviet official art.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Makarevich began to work on a large-scale series of natures mortes, paintings of old metal objects he found in abandoned buildings. Later in the decade, one of his friends brought him a metal case full of surgical instruments. In response, Makarevich created Surgical Instruments, a canvas that was much larger than any of his previous works and confronts the viewer with the force of these aggressive, sharp, harmful objects. When the painting was finished and hanging on Makarevich's wall, a doctor visited the artist and remarked on the photographic accuracy of the instruments depicted, explaining that they are used not only in the birth of a child, but in abortions as well.

A very similar work belongs to the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconformist Art at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.