Sots Art

Soz Art ( соц арт ) is the designation for a specifically Soviet art development, which deals in the style of Western pop art with the symbols of Socialist Realism, and so became one of the first art forms of Russian postmodernism.

Emergence of the concept

The term Soz kind goes back to the two Russian conceptual artists Komar Vitaly and Alex Melamid. In a Moscow art exhibition of 1972 expressed the Soviet architectural historian Vladimir Papernyi, Komar and Melamids works reminiscent of a Soviet version of Western Pop Art

Parallels to Pop Art

While western pop style reflects the commodity aesthetics of the capitalist economic system, Soz plays with the kind ideologemes of socialism. Instead of the abundance of goods, the artists want to draw attention to the abundance of ideology. Due to the alienation and irony of symbols, images and spellings of Socialist Realism is the kind Soz along with the Thaw literature, Samizdat and the Tamizdat literature at the beginning of the work-up and criticism of Socialist Realism.

Representative of the type Soz

• Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, artist couple
• Erik Bulatov,
• Aleksand Kosolapov (* 1943), Russian- American conceptual artist
• Vladimir Sorokin, writer
• Timur Kiribov ( born 1955 ), painter
• Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov (1940-2007), conceptual artist
• Leonid Sokov ( b. 1941 ), painter and sculptor

Collections and Exhibitions

As the first Western collectors Cologne couple Peter and Irene Ludwig bought in 1978 in the former Soviet Union works of Sots Art The images are now part of the collection "From the Russian avant-garde to the Sots Art " of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

• McLenin, tanks and bombers. House of the Russian Science and Culture, Berlin, 2000.
• Red Star. The transformation of the Red Star: Sots Art 60s to 90s. University of Basel in 2002.