Vladimir Dubossarsky

Biography

“Picasso in Moscow” (1994) is regarded as the first work that brought Dubossarsky and Vinogradov together: Picasso is shown against the background of the Kremlin. In the same year an exhibition of that title was held at the Studio 20 gallery in Moscow.

Vladimir Dubossarsky was born on 8 January 1964 in Moscow, into the family of the artist Efim Davidovich Dubossarsky. From 1980 to 1984 he studied at the Moscow Art School in Memory of 1905, then came the army, and in 1988–1991 he studied at the Surikov Moscow State Art Institute. He had known Alexander Vinogradov since their youth. In 1994 Dubossarsky was admitted to MOSKh, the Moscow Union of Artists.

They worked “four-handed”, so that the question of who had made a given painting lost its meaning. Their early pieces were done in the language of Socialist Realism, but in subject they resembled posters for non-existent thrillers and cheap erotic films. Workers, collective farmers and other familiar images of the Soviet “social commission” were given a contemporary twist. To this period belong “Russian Literature” (1996) and “Russian Troika” (1995), in which a coachman fires a Kalashnikov at a screaming demon. The subject goes back to the well-known comparison of Russia to a troika in Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls”. Exhibitions were held at the Guelman Gallery, L-Gallery and Moscow Fine Art in Moscow, and abroad from 1995 in Berlin (Kai Hilgemann’s gallery, “A Picture for the Reichstag”) and from 1997 in Vienna. In 2001 they began the project “Total Painting”, conceived as post-ideological painting made to order at a moment when the state had stopped commissioning large-scale works. Heroes of mass culture (Stallone, Spider-Man, Barbie, Madonna, Schwarzenegger, Marilyn Monroe, even Picasso) gather in “Our Best World” (2003), shown at Deitch Projects in New York. In 2003 the series “The Underwater World” went to the Russian pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale; to my mind, it was after this that international recognition came to the duo. “Luncheon on the Grass” (2002) has been in the collection of the Centre Pompidou since the same year. Solo exhibitions followed in Paris (Orel Art, 2003), London (Vilma Gold, 2004), Vienna (Krinzinger Gallery, 2003) and Geneva (2005).

The duo took part in the exhibitions “Russia!” in New York (2005) and Bilbao (2006), and in the showings of Sots Art, the Soviet-era Pop Art-like movement that parodied official imagery, at the Tretyakov Gallery and at La Maison Rouge in Paris in 2007. For the Tretyakov Gallery they made the project “The Four Seasons of Russian Painting” (2007), later added to its collection. Works by the duo are also in the State Russian Museum, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the museums of Avignon, Valencia and Durham (USA), and the Bonn Historical Museum.

In 2014 the collaboration with Vinogradov ended, and Dubossarsky has since exhibited on his own: in 2016 his exhibition “Sweeter than Sugar” was held at the Louise Alexander Gallery in Porto Cervo, and the Moscow Manege showed “FB Shows and Tells”. In 2012 he became a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts.