Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov Will Be Subjects of New Dodge Collection Exhibition

A new exhibition invites visitors to delve into one of the hallmarks of unofficial Soviet art from the height of the Cold War. Dialogues - Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov: Stories About Ourselves, which opens at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers on November 30, focuses on the two artists' work created in the format of the album: an innovative genre of visual art popularized in the 1970s by conceptual artists in Moscow. Drawn from the museum's Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, the exhibition provides a rare opportunity to view several albums in their entirety. With loose pages of delicately colored images, often complemented by handwritten texts, an album is simultaneously a drawing and a novel, an installation and a performance. They serve as an inspirational model for audience engagement, telling stories that are at once specific and universal. The public is invited to a free exhibition reception on Saturday, December 14. Additional programming will be announced. Details are available on the Zimmerli's website.

"Although this exhibition primarily looks at works that Kabakov and Pivovarov created in the 1970s," noted guest curator Ksenia Nouril, who organized Stories About Ourselves with Zimmerli curators Julia Tulovsky and Jane A. Sharp, "the passage of time allows us to assess how this period influenced their practices over the ensuing four decades. Both Kabakov and Pivovarov have stopped making albums, but these works remain the foundation for their respective contemporary practices. Their albums also are significant in the broader legacy of the era, speaking not only to artistic expression in a certain place and time, but also to the circulation of that production globally at the height of the Cold War."

Still active today, both Ilya Kabakov (b. 1933) and Viktor Pivovarov (b. 1937) were integral to the movement known as Moscow Conceptualism, which subversively flourished in the city from the 1960s to the 1990s. Artists worked in "unofficial" circles parallel to those of the artists who practiced in the state-sanction style of Socialist realism. However, the 1970s was a particularly difficult decade, marked by social, economic, and political stagnation.

Kabakov and Pivovarov each produced dozens of albums, addressing the triumphs and tribulations of their everyday lives in the Soviet Union at the time. Whereas official artists had established networks of support, those choosing to produce art in unofficial capacities had to be creative with their resources, finding outlets around social, political, and economic limitations. Both artists shared their albums in the semiprivate spaces of their homes and studios with friends - artists, writers, and intellectuals. Among such friends was the collector Norton Dodge, who visited their studios and purchased albums, bringing them back to the United States and eventually exhibiting them for global audiences.

With some 120 individual sheets, the exhibition includes the albums Shower - A Comedy (1970s-1985), Mathematical Gorsky (1969-73), and Fruits and Vegetables (1979) by Kabakov, as well as Stairway of the Spheres (1975), Tears (1975), and Sacralizators (1979) by Pivovarov. Two albums, in particular, draw viewers into the worlds of characters and their daily struggles, which - to an extent - are allegories of the artists' lives.

Kabakov deploys the artist-character in his album Mathematical Gorsky, one of ten albums in the cycle Ten Characters, which tells the often unfortunate and sadistically humorous stories of fictional personages who develop strategies to escape the doldrums of everyday Soviet life. It centers on a well-regarded mathematician and eventually draws the viewer's attention to the imperfect nature of humankind. Rendered delicately in colored pencil, the album's images are supplemented by statements from Gorsky, as well as from his mother and his peers expressing shock and concern at the mathematician's eventual demise. The commentary enhances the naturally narrative quality of the album, providing its visual components with some semblance of a backstory.

Viktor Pivovarov's album Tears is on view in its entirety for the first time in many years. It is the artist's first album to combine text and image. With 34 graphically driven pages, it employs words as symbols. For example, No. 9 from the series depicts a dripping faucet from which the words "kap kap kap" ("drip drip drip" in Russian) flow. As the artist stated in an interview for the exhibition catalogue, "Of all the graphic arts, the album genre is the most communicative.... There was already a first-person narrative in it [the story recounted in Tears]. For me, the intimate nature of an authorial character's address to the spectator was important." This exhibition is Pivovarov's first major presentation in the United States since the early 1990s.

In addition, a selection of both artists' paintings and children's book illustrations created during the same period, as well as portraits of both Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov, are on view. Drawings by Mikhail Belomlinsky (of Kabakov, 1980) and Eduard Gorokhovsky (of Pivovarov, 1977), and photographs by Lev Melikhov (of Kabakov, 1987, and Pivovarov, undated), provide viewers a glimpse of the artists. In particular, Melikhov's photo of Kabakov pictures him with his albums shortly before his emigration from the Soviet Union.

Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov: Stories About Ourselves is the second edition of Dialogues, the Zimmerli's series of dual career exhibitions from the Dodge Collection, which is designed to increase historical awareness of the aims and impact of unofficial art in the former Soviet Union by highlighting a particular aspect of it. Dialogues - The 60s Generation: Lydia Masterkova/Evgenii Rukhin, the inaugural exhibition organized by Julia Tulovsky and Jane A. Sharp, was on view from October 2018 to March 2019. Whether visitors are familiar with nonconformist art or not, the format of the Dialogues series provides a comprehensive introduction for newcomers, as well as fresh perspectives for visitors with longtime affinities.

Ksenia Nouril currently serves as Jensen Bryan Curator at The Print Center in Philadelphia. She holds a bachelor's degree in Art History and Slavic Studies from New York University, and a master's degree and doctorate in Art History from Rutgers, where she completed her dissertation "The Afterlives of Communism: The Historical Turn in Contemporary Art from Eastern Europe" in 2018. Her graduate studies were supported by the Dodge Fellowship, which provided Nouril hands-on experience conducting primary source research and developing exhibitions from the Dodge Collection. She organized Dreamworlds and Catastrophes: Intersections of Art and Technology in the Dodge Collection at the Zimmerli in 2016 (it later traveled). Upon completion of her doctorate, Nouril was invited to curate Dialogues--Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov: Stories About Ourselves, allowing her to incorporate dissertation research about Kabakov into an exhibition and publication, released in November 2019 by Rutgers University Press.

Dialogues - Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov: Stories About Ourselves, on view November 30, 2019, through March 29, 2020, is organized by Ksenia Nouril, Ph.D., Guest Curator, with Julia Tulovsky, Ph.D., Curator of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art, and Jane A. Sharp, Ph.D., Research Curator of Soviet Nonconformist Art at the Zimmerli and Professor of Art History at Rutgers. The exhibition, accompanying publication, and related programs are made possible with the support of the Avenir Foundation Endowment Fund and the Dodge Charitable Trust-Nancy Ruyle Dodge, Trustee.

NORTON AND NANCY DODGE COLLECTION OF NONCONFORMIST ART FROM THE SOVIET UNION

The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers is the largest and most comprehensive collection of unofficial Soviet art in the world. The collection includes over 20,000 works by more than 1,000 artists from Russia and the Soviet Republics, created from about 1956 to 1986. The collection was assembled by American economist Norton Dodge during his many business trips to the Soviet Union in the 1960s through the early 1970s, and through relationships with artists who later moved to the United States. The Zimmerli provides opportunities to study and exhibit these artworks, which otherwise might have been lost to time and circumstance, as well as position the Dodge Collection in the global dialogue about art, especially its relevance in the development of conceptual art in the 1970s and 1980s.

ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM|RUTGERS

The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum houses more than 60,000 works of art, ranging from ancient to contemporary art. The permanent collection features particularly rich holdings in 19th-century French art; Russian art from icons to the avant-garde; Soviet nonconformist art from the Dodge Collection; and American art with notable holdings of prints. In addition, small groups of antiquities, old master paintings, as well as art inspired by Japan and original illustrations for children's books, provide representative examples of the museum's research and teaching message at Rutgers. One of the largest and most distinguished university-based art museums in the nation, the Zimmerli is located on the New Brunswick campus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Established in 1766, Rutgers is America's eighth oldest institution of higher learning and a premier public research university.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Admission is free to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers. The museum is located at 71 Hamilton Street (at George Street) on the College Avenue Campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick. The Zimmerli is a short walk from the NJ Transit train station in New Brunswick, midway between New York City and Philadelphia.

The Zimmerli Art Museum is open Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., and select first Tuesdays of the month, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. The museum is closed Mondays and major holidays, as well as the month of August.

PaparazZi Café is open Monday through Thursday, 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Friday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., with a variety of breakfast, lunch, and snack items. The café is closed weekends and major holidays, as well as the month of August.

For more information, visit the museum's website www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu or call 848.932.7237.