DISCUSSION: ARTIST VITALY KOMAR AND SASHA OBUKHOVA, HEAD OF GARAGE ARCHIVE COLLECTION
Friday, June 12, 20:00–21:00
Garage Education Center
Free admission
Renowned artist Vitaly Komar, one of the founders of Sots Art, will talk about the evolution of his artistic career and the events that shaped his artistic strategy and style. He will also address issues of succession and interference in art, whether in teacher-student relationships or between associates and co-creators.
Vitaly Komar was born in Moscow in 1943. In 1967, he graduated from the Moscow Higher School of Industrial and Applied Arts (Stroganov University). He began collaborating with his friend and classmate Alexander Melamid in 1972. That same year, the artists came up with the Sots Art manifesto, marking the beginning of one of the definitive trends in postwar art in Russia. In 1974, Komar took part in the infamous Bulldozer Exhibition. Having emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1977, he settled in New York, where he is currently based.
Sasha Obukhova was born in 1967. She is head of Garage Archive Collection and an art historian. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1992, and in 1993 she studied at the Central European University in Prague. She has worked at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the State Tretyakov Gallery, and the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow. In 2000, she was involved in a working group that curated a permanent exhibition for the Tretyakov Gallery entitled The Art of the Second Half of the 20th Century. In 2004, she became a founding member and director of the Art Projects Fund, where she established ACRA (Archive of Contemporary Russian Art). She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Kandinsky Prize. Obukhova has been the Head of Garage Archive Collection since 2012.
