ORELART PARIS Art Contemporain Russe et International

Dubossarsky & Vinogradov’s duet appeared on the international artistic scene in the early 1990’s. Their work is a kind of aesthetic hybrid between socialist realism and pop art, playing with cultural mass media stereotypes. The main subject of their painting is focused on television and movies celebrities, artists, writers and politicians. As they say : “We can talk about war, peace or maybe dreams in our painting, but all of that in only one picture”.

Over the past 10 years, Dubossarsky & Vinogradov have painted wide allegoric pictures, describing a narrative line of physical urges and roundabout symbols. According to the traditional studio work, as Pierre and Gilles or Gilbert and George do, Alexandre and Vladimir usually paint by four hands. In this binomial working, they face themselves to the artwork attribution.

Reacting against Radical art, Sots Art* and Russian conceptualism, their painting belongs to neo pompier style, such as an heritage which directly comes from socialist realistic aesthetic. And they claim it in order to give a clear understanding of their own work. Therefore the artistic duet establishes an hedonist utopia against subjective positions of History. They decline this post-perestroika artwork in reactive rich thematics : lost paradise, regained time, old Orientalist fantasy thrown on the Occidental world. All these themes had already been illustrated in « Underwater Forever » and « Aqua Fitness » series.

Today, Dubossarsky & Vinogradov have been well recognized on the international artistic scene, especially after their remarkable participation at Venice 50th Biennale.

In their « 9 NUDES » new series, they have substituted their usual social thematic for the painting itself. Now they want to develop all the potential of it. They take up again with the classical composition, by studying a female model, which is the typical learning method in Fine Arts Schools. As a matter of fact, the single pattern is a seated woman on the edge of a bed. Inside and outside this scene, the setting changes in each of the nine pictures, then that creates a subtil dialogue between all these modules. Inside this environment which seems to be urban, the declination of that feminine subject shows us the way to many different feelings. We are not anymore in a kitsch paradise, where the artistic duet used to illustrate Russian post-sovietic consumers’ happiness. We are therefore surrounded by intimate reality, that is the brand new asking in their pictural work.

From now on, Vladimir Dubossarsky & Alexandre Vinogradov endeavour less to depict the human subject than to decline their coloured and emotional palette. In this way, they renew their art in a more philosophical thinking.

*Sots Art : Sovietic historical art movement