Grisha Bruskin

Acquired directly from the artist

Bern, Kunstmuseum Bern, Ich Lebe - Ich Sehe: Künstler der Achtziger Jahre in Moskau, 11 June - 14 August 1988
Bern, Kunstmuseum Bern, Avantgarde im Untergrund. Russische Nonkonformisten aus der Sammlung Bar-Gera, 3 February - 24 April 2005

Grisha Bruskin. Life is Everywhere, St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2001, p.11, no.5 illustrated

Original canvas. There are very minor abrasions along the edges with flecks of paint loss in places. There are two horizontal parallel lines of dark pigment going through the heads of the man and woman. There is another area with a dark pigment at the centre of the bottom edge. There is a fleck of paint below the pedestal. There are surface scratches to the right of the body of the woman and another one to the pedestal. Visible in the top left corner is a small area of craquelure. Inspection under UV light reveals some uneven discolouration to the varnish in places. Held in a wooden strip frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Executed in 1982, Moonlight belongs to the body of work dating to the early 1980s which also includes Monuments, Monuments 2 and Partner, among others, some of which were sold at the 1988 Sotheby’s auction in Moscow, which brought Bruskin’s name to international attention.

Alongside Judaism, the mythology of the Soviet State is the other major theme of Bruskin’s work. Like any repressive political regime relying on ideology or the personality cult of its leaders, the Soviet regime erected countless statues and monuments in the public spaces of its villages, towns and cities. Growing up in the Soviet Union, Bruskin would have seen ubiquitous statues of Lenin and other political leaders and revolutionaries, as well as of workers, farmers and sportsmen, often mass-produced in cheap materials. By 1982, the year Brezhnev died, the Soviet Union had entered a phase of stagnation and the disjunction between the ideology of the Soviet State and the everyday reality experienced by its citizens had become obvious. As Alexander Borovsky points out, ‘the material with which Sots Art was dealing was already no longer an ideology in the classical sense of the word, but a certain conventional cynical position: a fully enlightened, reflexive false consciousness which, satisfied with ritual pseudo-sacrifices, had no pretensions whatsoever to being seen as the sole truth.’ (A.Borovsky, ‘Towards Bruskin’, in: Grisha Bruskin. Life is Everywhere, 2001, p.131)

In the present work, the two dancing figures have the same empty gazes as Bruskin’s sculptures from his Birth of a Hero series (1987-1990), each an architype of Soviet ideology holding symbols of the Soviet state. Like a monument brought to life, the couple, staring into the distance without emotion, appears to be dancing off their pedestal, about to fall into the abyss.