Beschreibung:

Erik Bulatov Perestroika 1989 Oil on canvas. 106 1/4 x 107 3/4 in. (269.24 x 273.7 cm) Signed, titled and dated “E. Bulatov 89 Perestroika [in Cyrillic]” on the reverse.
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist Exhibited Ridgefield (Connecticut), Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Adaptation & Negation of Socialist Realism, June 9 – October 7, 1990; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, USSR Today, September 21 – November 4, 1990; Santiago de Compostela, Auditoria de Galicia, No Vacio, Artistas Rusos Contemporaneos, May 11 – June 30, 1991; Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Face à l’Histoire 1933-1996, December 19, 1996 – April 7, 1997; Moscow, State Tretyakov Gallery, Erik Bulatov That’s It., September 19 – November 19, 2006 Literature J. Gambrell and Y. Barabanov, Adaptation & Negation of Socialist Realism, Ridgefield, 1990, p. 11 (illustrated); B. Schwabsky and J. Bobko, “Perestroika in New York, A Conversation with Erik Bulatov”, Arts Magazine, November, 1989, n.p. (illustrated); A. Gonzalez, L. Sobrino Manzanares and M. Tupitsyn, No Vacio, Artistas Rusos Contemporaneos, Galicia, 1991, p. 70 (illustrated); N. Divona, N. Godzina, A. Kharitonova, I. Lebedeva and A. Yerofeev, Erik Bulatov That’s It., Moscow, 2006 p. 120 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay After a large retrospective held in the fall of 2006 at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, nobody had any doubts that there is today a great Russian artist and that this artist's name is Erik Bulatov What the viewers saw in the exhibition galleries was not only powerful conceptual art; this was a kind of apotheosis of painting as the mightiest expressive means of contemporary art. Works, gathered from all over the world (and works by Erik Bulatov belong to the collections of such world-famous museums as the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, The Museum of Fine Art, Basel, The Museum of Fine Art, Bern, Zimmerli Museum, USA, etc.) presented the artist’s creative path, marked by the utmost integrity of the artist’s creative concept and his aspiration for its perpetual development. Perestroika was painted by Erik Bulatov in 1989, when the situation in the USSR had changed dramatically and the artist had the real opportunity to leave the country and to start actively working and exhibiting abroad. That same year Perestroika was displayed at exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and at Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York. It was purchased from this latter exhibition by John Stewart and for 18 years has remained one of the key works in his collection. This painting was preceded by another one on the same subject, painted a year earlier while the artist was still in the USSR. The sketch for this painting, now in the collection of John Stewart was also produced in Moscow. In the same year, 1989, by order of French authorities, Bulatov produced drawings for a huge banner which was mounted on a dirigible and raised in the air in Lyon during celebrations commemorating the 200th Anniversary of the French Revolution, and again the word “perestroika” became the main element of these sketches. Why did this theme become so important for the artist that he appealed to it several times within two years? It is already hard today to imagine the feelings and thoughts which reigned over the people in the mid- and late 1980's after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and had proclaimed the beginning of perestroika. This word was repeated and manipulated in all sorts of ways during those years in the USSR; it was constantly reproduced in Western mass-media and became no less popular and current in the West than in the USSR. In the country of victorious socialism, thoughtful people associated great expectations for serious radical changes with this word. Nevertheless, it was impossible not to notice the fact that the ideology of perestroika and the methods by which it was being implemented continued to be quite Soviet. The painting by Bulatov became the most profound aesthetic understanding of this phenomenon, its exhaustive artistic formula. Huge letters constituting the word “PERESTROIKA” (this is the only case in Bulatov's work when volumetric