Boris Mikhailov

 Silver print hand coloured with aniline dyes. Signed on the reverse. This work is from an edition of 10, each is unique due to quality of the process.

Boris Michajlov, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, 1995 (another edition exhibited)

Total Enlightenment: Moscow Conceptual Art 1960–1990, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2008 (another edition exhibited)

The World Belongs To You, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2011-2012 (another edition exhibited)

Boris Mikhailov: Time is Out of Joint, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, 2012 (another edition exhibited)

Gilda Williams, Boris Mikhailov 55, London, 2001, another version illustrated in colour on cover

Urs Stahel (ed.), Boris Mikhailov: A Retrospective, Zurich, 2003, illustrated in colour p. 51

Diane Neumaier (ed.), Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-related Works of Art, New Brunswick, NJ, 2004, illustrated in colour  p. 272

David Teboul, Boris Mikhailov: I've Been Here Once Before, Munich, 2011, detail illustrated in colour

Very good overall condition. Slight wear along the sheet edges. Small area of creasing and dirt on the upper left corner and a tiny tear on the lower left corner of margin.
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In the 1970s Boris Mikhailov worked part-time as a commercial photographer on the side, a job which sometimes involved retouching family photographs using hand colouration in order to enhance the appearances of the subjects and the scenery. Developing the idea of fakeness inherent in these early retouchings, Mikhailov started collecting old, discarded or forgotten photographs and manipulating them using the same colouring technique. The series of coloured photographs, entitled Luriki (1971-1985), assume a new symbolic meaning in the hands of the artist, who for the first time in Soviet photography begins to use the ‘ready-made’ as material for his own work.

In this work, two young sailors are photographed with a toy bear. Mikhailov satirizes the naiveté of the Soviet home-photography and the hunger for beauty implicated in its modest, and often obscure, decorations. Nostalgic at first glance, these early manipulated photographs criticise the collective beauty prescribed by the Soviet ideology, which censored both the public and the private aspects of daily life. The anonymous photograph provided Mikhailov with a method to introduce strand of irony and kitsch elements, and explore meanings hidden under the umbrella of Soviet ideology.

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