At a glance
■ “Red Horizon: Contemporary Art and Photography in the USSR and Russia, 1960-2010” continues through Sept. 24 at the Columbus Museum of Art, 480 E. Broad St. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays. Admission: $20, or $14 for senior citizens and students 18 or older, $11 for children 6 to 17, free for children 5 or younger and for members. Call 614-221-6801 or visit www. columbusmuseum.org. more than dogma. Many are surreal or abstract.
For example, Francisco Infante’s tempera piece “First Impression of Rodchenko’s Works” — a reference to Russian artist Alexander Rodchenko — presents a cone-shaped object unfurling against a dark crisscrossing pattern, while another tempera piece, “Spiral,” displays bright intertwined lines, somewhat resembling fiber-optic cables, pulsating through a pitch-black background.
Abstraction is also a focus of the work by Eduard Steinberg, whose series of oil-on-canvases, “Suprematism Composition,” present thin lines, semicircles and triangles against calm, neutral backgrounds.
Some artists take a parodic approach to political figures in the Soviet Union.
In Leonid Sokov’s oil-onmetal “Comrade Stalin,” Stalin is shown sitting in a tasseled chair with a dog in his lap; next to him is a side table with a flowering plant. The homey setting — painted in an eye-straining mix of red and green — is at odds with the legacy of the brutal leader.
Also wickedly clever are paintings by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, whose subjects include Stalin balancing atop a giant ball. The duo’s angriest, most impressive work is the oilon-canvas “Venus De Milo,” in which a likeness of the Greek sculpture is defaced with graffiti-style additions: The statue is given arms holding the Communist symbols of the sickle and the hammer.
The photographers in the show also break boundaries, taking the sort of poetic pictures — such as Alexander Slussarev’s image of a tree casting a shadow on a street curb — disapproved of by the government.
Such photographs, Sawyer said, invite the viewer to “start interpreting and thinking critically and inventing meaning, which is the very opposite of what propaganda is.”
Other photographs depict quotidian scenes, such as Boris Mikhalevkin’s image of two girls exercising beside a rickety fence in a field, or Yuri Rybtchinski’s shot of a middle-aged woman in her kitchen under the watchful eye of Vladimir Lenin — whose picture is affixed to a wall.
The exhibit reflects the resiliency of the artists and photographers.
Said Sawyer: “It’s a testament to the drive for creativity and the creative spirit even under extremely difficult circumstances.”