CONSTRUCTING MODERN MEMORIES: MASLOV and KOZAKOV, 2 UKRAINIAN ARTISTS

Although scheduled long before the last election, this exhibit now coincides with renewed curiosity about former Soviet Union states, particularly Russia and Ukraine. ANDREY KOZAKOV’s work is a contemporary and western influenced progression of the Russian/Eastern European constructivist* art movement. GUENNADI MASLOV’s photography of Ukraine shows us the continuing effect of former Soviet days and Russia’s current intervention on a place and people with their own tenacious identity. Their work gives us a better understanding of Ukraine, its Soviet history and present political situation, avant-garde Constructivism, the responsive Soviet art movement of Social Realism, and like all “good art” a better understanding of our own place and time.

*Constructivism is an austere branch of abstract art founded by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko in Russia around 1915. It was premised on the philosophy that art should reflect the modern industrial world, and generate ideas useful to mass production and social utility. Threatened by the imaginative, progressive nature of avant-garde/abstract movements, Stalin oppressed Constructivism with Social Realism, the style associated with historic propaganda.