Collection of Russian Contemporary Art to Be Sold at Phillips de Pury & Company, London

LONDON – Phillips de Pury & Company, London will offer the most significant collection of Russian contemporary art from the private collection of Mr. John L. Stewart on Saturday, October 13, 2007. Exceptional works by leading contemporary artists Eric Bulatov, Oleg Vassilyev, Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky, Ivan Chuikov, Boris Mikhailov, Natalya Nesterova, Dubossarsky & Vinogradov and Vadim Zakharov will be offered at this sale.

This selection of works represents some of the best work by the most important Russian contemporary artists and which were acquired by the collector in many cases, shortly after they were executed. With the exception of the works by Dubossarsky & Vinogradov, all these works were painted in Russia and St. Petersburg before or during Perestroika.

Each of the artists represented in the sale has emerged as a leader of the contemporary art movement in Russia and now, either still based in the Russian Federation or having emigrated to the Europe or North America, are all key figures in the global contemporary art scene. These artists, some recognized as official artists of the Soviet regime and others not, all came forward to the international scene in the 1980s during Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika or precarious ‘economic restructuring’ of the Soviet Union. In 1988, when the official artists’ union collapsed, ‘unofficial’ and ‘official’ artists emerged and openly toyed with the Soviet ideological system.

Considered a leader in the movements of Moscow Conceptualism and Sots Art, Eric Bulatov has transgressed the ideology of the Soviet system in order to unravel its illusion and false representation. Now one of the most celebrated contemporary artists, Phillips de Pury & Company will present three major works by this artist to include the 1977 work, Soviet Cosmos. This work represents one of the seminal works of the Sots Arts movement which treated the Soviet regime with Pop Art symbolism with the interplay of deep symbolic irony. Central to the painting is a portrait of a gloried Brezhnev with a backdrop of Russian flags. Soviet Cosmos, 1977 will be offered with a pre-sale estimate of £1,000,000 – 1,500,000.

Other works by Erik Bulatov to be offered are Perestroika, 1989 estimated between £750,000 – 1M and Winter, 1989 estimated between £400,000 – 600,000. Here as in so many of the Russian conceptualist works, the Romantic landscape is a device that is rendered frought with contradiction and its idyll inaccessible. Winter, depicting a dirty explosion in a rural winter landscape blanketed in pure white snow is a metaphor for Peretroikya and the havoc it reaped on the heartland of Russia. Phillips de Pury & Company established the current record for the artist at auction with the sale of Ne Prislonyatsa (Do Not Lean), 1987 which sold for £916,000 in June of this year.

“I try to use the language of Soviet reality, which is one of political clichés, used to expound ideology. In this official, impersonal idiom very personal things can be expressed. I concentrate on the thing itself, rather than on my relationship to it…Essentially pictures are my idea of freedom. They provide the space beyond the social world. I think that the worst thing that Soviet propaganda has done, forgetting the lies and nonsense, is to have persisted in brainwashing us into believing that the social world we inhabit daily is the only reality.”

(E. Bulatov and A. Mittal, “Excerpts from a dialogue,” Artisti Russi Contemporanei, Prato, p. 41)

Three works by Oleg Vassilyev will be offered which include The Window, 1988 and Zone N1 (H046), 1987 both estimated between £30,000-40,000.

There will be three works by Svetlana Kopystiansky including the oil on canvas, Seascape, 1995 estimated between £40,000-50,000. The playwright Samuel Beckett is directly referenced in the Seascape series which was first exhibited at London’s, Lisson Gallery in 2006. Lines from his text are inscribed on the canvas which is term has been folded to create in a mesmerizing wave-like pattern.

A group of 16 photographs by Boris Mikhailov, Untitled (16 Works) 1967-1982 will be offered with an estimate between £4,000-6,000. Boris Mikhailov was the only Russian artist included in Tate Modern’s Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph in 2003 which featured works by the most notable documentary photographers of the century: August Sander, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky and Diane Arbus.

A large selection of fourteen canvases and watercolors by Dubossarsky & Vinogradov will be offered featuring Younger Brother, 1996 which will be offered with a pre-sale estimate of £100,000-150,000. The youngest artists included in this sale, the works by Dubossarsky & Vingradov reference both American art of the 1970s and 1980s but also in more subtle ways, the art of the earlier underground Russian artists such as Ilya Kabakov.

Ivan Chuikov, part of the Moscow Conceptualism movement uses text, illustration and graphic design – so much the lexicon of the regime’s propaganda efforts – to subvert the ideology and confront the reality of the political and artistic suppression. Four works by the artist will offered including Postcard, Fragment of Postcard, Fragment of Fragment 1984 in enamel on wood Fragment of Postcard and Self-Portrait, 1985 both with an estimate between £75,000 -100,000.

The John L. Stewart Collection of Russian Contemporary Art will be one of the four main sales of contemporary art held on October 13 at Phillips de Pury & Company, London. The Collection of Howard and Patricia Farber of Chinese Contemporary Art will follow this sale. The most important private collection of art of this kind, the sale of this collection along with the sale of the John L. Stewart Collection will underscore the company’s dedication to unite the best of art from all regions within the contemporary art framework.

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