Komar & Melamid

Vitaly Komar (born in 1943) and Alexander Melamid (born in 1945) are from Moscow. They attended the course at the Stroganov School of Art and Design, from which they graduated in 1967.
Their first joint exhibition, titled *Retrospectivism*, took place at the Blue Bird café in Moscow in 1967.
"Even if one of us alone creates certain projects or works, we generally sign them both. We are not simply an artist, we are a movement" (excerpt from an artists' statement).
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Komar and Melamid founded the movement they call "Sots Art"; it is a unique variant of Soviet Pop Art and conceptual art, blending the principles of Dadaism and socialist realism. During this period, they also worked on "Post-Art," creating images in multiple styles that foreshadow postmodernism, which would have great success in the 1980s. They collaborate on various conceptual projects ranging from painting and performance to installation, public sculpture, photography, music, and poetry. They also collaborate with other artists, such as Douglas Davis, Charlotte Moorman (member of the Fluxus movement) and Andy Warhol, among others.
In 1973, they were excluded from the youth section of the Union of Soviet Artists. In 1974, they were arrested during a performance organized in a Moscow apartment; subsequently, their works—as well as those of other nonconformist artists—were destroyed by Soviet authorities during the open-air exhibition known as the "Bulldozer Show." In 1978, they were installed in New York. Their first exhibition in the West took place at the Feldman Gallery (New York, 1976), and their first solo exhibition in a museum was at the Hartford Athenaeum (Hartford, United States, 1978). In the 1980s, they continued the development of their "Sots Art" (series *Nostalgic Socialist Realism*, May 1st installation at the Palladium discotheque) and their "Post-Art" (series *Diary*, *Anarchistic Synthesis* and *Bayonne, N.J.*). They are the first Russian artists to receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the first to be invited to Documenta 8 (Cassel, Germany, 1987).
During the 1990s, they dedicated their projects to iconoclasm (*Monumental Propaganda*, *American Dreams*), democracy and statist elitism (*People's Choice*), as well as ecology (*Ecollaboration with Animals*, *Asian Elephant Project*). Komar & Melamid's most recent projects address art as religion and the synthesis between irony and spirituality (*Van Gogh Art Ministry*, *Symbols of the Big Bang* and *Nostalgic Nonconformist Art*, an ongoing project).
They appear in several reference books, including the *Dictionary of 20th Century Art* (Oxford), the *Penguin Concise Dictionary of Art History*, *Art Since the 40's*, *Bildende Kunst im 20 Jahrhundert* and *The 20th–Century Art Book* (Phaidon).
Among their solo exhibitions, one can mention: Museum of Modern Art (Oxford, 1985) and Musée des Arts décoratifs du Louvre (Paris, 1985–1986); NGBK (Berlin, 1987); Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York, 1989); Museum of Modern Art (Cologne, 1997); Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, 1998); Venice Biennale (Venice, 1999); Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art (Japan, 2003); Yeshiva University Museum (New York, 2002–2003). Selected public collections: Guggenheim Museum (New York), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Albertina (Vienna), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), San Francisco Museum of Art.