Painting to Scale Reopening - Rethinking Dissent in the USSR: Practices & Possibilities in the Arts
Painting to Scale
11/13/2024 - 09/14/2025
Drawing from the Zimmerli’s rarely shown large scale artworks from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection, Painting to Scale explores the constraints on access to materials that underpin narratives of “nonconformism” in the USSR. Artists from diverse republics managed to work either in large scale serial formats or single images, often painted in oil on canvas, despite the very real limits on space and access to exhibition spaces that characterized their professional lives. By highlighting important artworks that were painted/created on a large, sometimes monumental scale, the exhibition underscores the ambitions and confidence expressed by artists who, paradoxically, may rarely have had an opportunity to present them to a larger public. It suggests the need for a more nuanced and ambivalent view of professional access and accommodation in the underground artworld than has been typically presented.
A section of the exhibition will include a selection of works that focus on the artist’s identity, national and symbolic, depicted through traditional—figurative—and abstract representational forms. The second area addresses nature, whether by emphasizing its artifice or evoking a desired proximity to it; the third highlights the allegorical and duplicitous strategies that were shared by artists despite a diversity of visual modes.
Organized by Jane Sharp, Research Curator for Soviet Nonconformist Art.
The exhibition was realized with the assistance of Rutgers Master’s students, who authored many of the interpretive labels: Suny Cardenas-Gomez, Thomas Carr, Luke Dmitrov-Kuhl. Ray Fury, Aida Golchin, Samantha Kahle, Meng-Meng Kang, Madeline Lacour, George Papashvili, Suny, Lauren Rostash, Annie Wertheimer.
Generous support for bilingual text was provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program.
Leonhard Lapin, The White Wave from the series Signs, 1978. Oil on canvas. Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / EAÜ, Tallinn D06250
Raul Meel, Under the Sky series. Color screenprint on paper. Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. © Raul Meel. Photo by McKay Imaging
Painting to Scale. Exhibition view. Photo by McKay Imaging
Painting to Scale. Exhibition view. Photo by McKay Imaging
Andrei Filippov, Ultima Thule (Artists in the Same Direction), 1992. Oil on canvas with two wooden crutches overall: 96.5 x 298.5 cm (38 x 117 1/2 in.). Gift of Christian K. Keesee. 2002.0488.001-003. © Andrei Filippov. Photo by McKay Imaging
Raul Meel, Traveling into the Green, 1973-1979. Oil on canvas. Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. D05404.001-008. © Raul Meel. Photo by McKay Imaging
Accordion Content
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Painting to Scale
Drawn from the Zimmerli’s Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection, Painting to Scale challenges narratives that have defined “nonconformism” in the USSR. This selection of rarely shown artworks from Belarus’, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Russia calls for our renewed attention to the unofficial artists’ ambitions and achievements. Despite the very real limits on space and opportunities to exhibit that shaped their professional lives, nonconforming artists from diverse republics of the former USSR managed to work either in large-scale serial formats or single images, including painting in oil on canvas, countering the commonly held view that deprivation determined value in “underground” art.
These multiple, sometimes monumental, and individual images employ a range of themes and variety of media to counter official insistence on adherence to the goals of socialist realism. Proscriptions such as a ban on abstract art as well as on overt references to national symbols and personal self-reflection encouraged artists to create on the margins, away from official scrutiny. But in their material presence and scale, the works included here also suggest that many artists managed to find levels of accommodation and public access within the underground artworld.
The exhibition is organized thematically, opening in the front space with images that focus on the artists’ concern with self-representation (The Multiplied Self). The second area addresses a shared interest in nature (Nature Denaturalized). The third explores the coded nature of representation in unofficial art by highlighting allegorical and abstract systemic forms adopted by a diverse range of artists (Codes and Camouflage).
The exhibition was organized by Dr. Jane A. Sharp, Professor, Department of Art History, and Research Curator, Dodge Collection, Rutgers University.
The exhibition was realized with the assistance of Rutgers Master’s students, who authored many of the interpretive labels: Suny Cardenas-Gomez, Thomas Carr, Luke Dmitrov-Kuhl. Ray Fury, Aida Golchin, Samantha Kahle, Meng-Meng Kang, Madeline Lacour, George Papashvili, Suny, Lauren Rostash, Annie Wertheimer.
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