Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid

Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid (respectively, born Sept. 11, 1943, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R; born July 14, 1945, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R) were a Russian-born American artistic duo known for their collaborative works that commented on power and popular culture using a wide range of media. They worked together from 1965 to 2003.

Komar and Melamid both grew up in Moscow. Their educations followed the same path: they attended the Moscow Art School from 1958 to 1960 and then the Stroganov Institute of Art and Design, where they began their collaborative work. Rather than following the dictates of Socialist Realism, the style officially endorsed by the Soviet government, they chose a dissident role. Together they launched the SOTS Art movement, a Soviet version of Pop art, in 1967. After much difficulty, Komar and Melamid immigrated to the United States in 1978.

Even while participating in the much less restrictive American culture, they managed to maintain a dissident and critical edge, as demonstrated in projects such as the construction of a 4.9-metre (16-foot) tower on which they “sacrificed” Komar’s suitcase. They collaborated with other artists on numerous pieces, including a video project, Questions New York/Moscow (1976), with artist Douglas Davis. In 1979, with Andy Warhol, they created a fake corporation that bought and sold souls. The result of this collaboration was a series of documents detailing the amounts for which various people, including Warhol, had sold their souls. In the early 1980s Komar and Melamid produced a series of paintings, Nostalgic Social Realism, that used the very style that they had so pointedly rejected while living in the Soviet Union to skewer both Western perceptions of the Soviet Union and Soviet ideals themselves.

Through their Ecollaboration project (1995), Komar and Melamid used paintings created in concert with an elephant to both call into question traditional definitions of art and draw attention to the problems facing elephants. They later expanded the project such that paintings by elephants, once used in the declining logging industry of Southeast Asia, would be sold and the profits used to provide for the “artists” and their human caretakers. For another project, Komar and Melamid joined the composer David Soldier in creating an opera, Naked Revolution (1997). The work explored concepts of revolution and history through the dreams of a New York City cab driver.

Komar and Melamid gained considerable attention in 1998 with publication of their book Painting by Numbers, which documents their international survey of aesthetic tastes in painting. The project began in late 1993 when they hired a market research firm to poll people in several countries about their taste in art; they began posting the results on the World Wide Web in 1995. On the basis of the poll, the duo then created a Web site showing the Most Wanted and the Least Wanted paintings by country. Although there were some minor variations, the majority of people who participated preferred images of recognizable objects over abstractions, and blue was by far the favourite colour.

Symbols of the Big Bang (2003), the pair’s last collaborative installation, used a plethora of religious symbols variously altered and rendered in paint, marker, and pastel, to allegorically depict the origins of the world. Thereafter the two artists pursued individual careers.