Cast of Characters

The album genre occupies a special place in the art of Moscow Conceptualism. The founders of this genre are Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov. The album is a hand‑drawn entire work with its own narrative and dramaturgy, consisting of a set of unbound sheets. As a postmodern phenomenon, the album combines several elements: book illustration, text, and a kind of ritual, performative action that takes place during a reading or public demonstration.

Viktor Pivovarov's first album (Staircase of Balls) appeared in 1975, in parallel to his work in book illustration and painting. His albums are characterized by a philosophical and lyrical tone, and the subjects are often a poeticized reflection on everyday life. After moving to Prague in 1982, nostalgic motifs appeared in Pivovarov's work, and his characters are often friends, relatives, and colleagues from Moscow life.

In 1996 Pivovarov created the album Cast of Characters, in which he captured the everyday life of real people, members of Moscow’s artistic and poetic community of the 1970s. Among them are artists Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Oskar Rabin, Mikhail Shvartsman, Yuri Sobolev, and Ivan Chuikov, poets and writers Igor Kholin, Genrikh Sapgir, and Yuri Mamleev, religious philosopher Evgeny Schiffers, and many others. There are meetings in studios, night‑time conversations about the eternal, Sunday drawings, philosophical dialogues, domestic life, KGB interrogations, allegorical portraits, and so on. As art historian Ekaterina Lazareva writes, “the atmosphere of this unique ‘unity of the collective soul’ is conveyed by Pivovarov in an extremely subjective way. Where necessary he adds a big blue ear or a meaningful red robe to accurate portrait images. In the genre scenes he provides intimate details of communal life with slight irony. In the allegories ‘A Conversation about Art’ and ‘The Last Existentialist’ he captures the ideas that are in the air.”

In 1997, the album Cast of Characters was shown at Obscuri Viri Gallery in Moscow. In 2001, a book of Pivovarov's memoirs, The Agent in Love, was published, in which the artist supplemented many of the themes described in the album with commentaries and reflections.