Shifting Focus: Art Incorporating Photography
The medium of photography is an important part of the Soviet nonconformist artists' vocabulary. Shifting Focus explored the use of photography in Soviet nonconformist art, and features works by seven contemporary artists who incorporate photographic or printed images into their work. As this exhibition demonstrates, a variety of individual styles can be achieved through the use of photographic materials. All of the artists in this show were originally trained in media other than photography, and for them the camera is merely another tool—the appropriate medium for their current concerns. Influenced by various twentieth-century movements, including conceptual art, they are not constrained by the reportorial conventions of photography. Rather, the use of photographic medium opens up new expressive possibilities. In the words of Eduard Gorokhovsky, one of the artists represented here, "the shift to photography led me to a new aesthetic, to a new standard."
Artists in the show: Vagrich Bakhchanyan, Eduard Gorokhovsky, Gennady Goushchin, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Igor Kopystiansky, and Alexei Levchenko.
Organized by Alla Rosenfeld, Curator of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art, and Jeffrey Wechsler, Senior Curator.
Gennady Goushchin, Renaissance Portrait, from the series Alternative Museum, 1989–90. Photocollage on paper, 54.6 x 42.8 cm (21 1/2 x 16 7/8 in.). Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. D14577