Untitled. From the series Popular Science Art
Pertsy group (Peppers)
1990
In storage
- With participation ofOleg Petrenko, Ludmila Skripkina
- Category
- MediumFiberboard, enamel, plastic
- Dimensions200 × 160 × 15 cm
- Сollection
- Inventory numberМСИГ_ОФ_200_О_40
- Acquired from
- Year of acquisition2025
Keywords
About the work
Pertsy is an art group founded by Oleg Petrenko and Lyudmila Skripkina that belonged to the generation shaped by perestroika. Partly continuing the avant‑garde traditions of OBERIU and Dadaism, the duo developed a unique artistic language in which irony coexists with post‑structuralist critique of the sign. Their practice grew from a sense of dissonance between the formal structure of Soviet “knowledge” and its inner hollowness.
Untitled
—which continues the artists’ large‑scale series of absurdist charts titled Popular Science Art—appears as a dead construction, a symbol of bureaucratic emptiness and routine formality. For the artists, this incongruity between form and content became an occasion for ironic reflection on the perestroika era. The surface of the panel is decorated with counter‑reliefs of canisters, as if trying to break through from an otherworldly dimension but held back by the grid of the chart. This layered and schizo‑hallucinatory imagery creates an interpretive space and inevitably evokes a sense of confusion. The artists deliberately avoided direct interpretations, evasively remarking that works designed as scientific or pseudo‑scientific studies possess “a specific semantic capacity.”