Vitaly Komar

The board has been nailed to a wooden stretcher. Protrusions made by the nail heads are visible in the canvas at the corners, along the edges and in the centre of the right hand side of the composition. The canvas edges are fraying slightly, notably along the bottom edge, and there is creasing to the top right and bottom left corners. There are a few scattered paint chips, in the centre of the left-hand side and in the lower right quadrant. Other minor spotss of scattered paint loss which have been restored are visible to the naked eye. There are a few flecks of dirt in the lower right of the composition and numerous fibres are trapped throughout the uneven varnish layer. Inspection under UV light reveals the aforementioned scattered spots of retouching as well as the uneven varnish layer. Held in a wooden tray frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Painted in the year when Vitaly Komar began his famous collaboration with Alexander Melamid, the present image of a young man trapped in a niche, alone with a bottle and glass, is a haunting depiction of the claustrophobia of a regime which drove so many to excessive drinking and early graves. 'The white figure in this painting is the soul', explained the artist, 'crying out' against the oppressive Soviet surrounding represented here by the ubiquitous scarlet colour. 'Alcoholic protest was a form of non-conformism' and this painting is a tribute to the large number of artists and musicians from his immediate circle who did not survive. The work is closely related to a series of conceptual paintings Komar showed in the 1967 group exhibition, Retrospectivism, at the bohemian Blue Bird Cafe in Moscow.