Soft verge
July 5 – September 9, 2018
Curator: Anatoly Osmolovsky
Artists: Anatoly Osmolovsky, Alexander Golinsky
Vadim Sidur Museum, MMOMA, Moscow
The title of the collaborative project by artists Anatoly Osmolovsky and Alexander Golynsky is an inverted phrase referencing the practices of geometric and post-painterly abstraction of the late 1950s and 1960s (Hard Edge). The series of canvas covers, in which Osmolovsky encases some of Sidur’s works from the museum’s main exhibition, has been created with the compositions and dimensions of the Soviet classic’s works in mind. The dark green colour with orange stitching is borrowed from the Russian armed forces. Such covers are used for military camouflage to protect the equipment.
In this manner, Sidur’s modernist sculptures are masked by military-style covers. Art is camouflaged as weaponry; in anticipation of war, it is concealed. For Sidur, the theme of war was one of the central ones. However, the sculptor developed this theme by depicting suffering, violence, and wounds. In a new context, all this is hidden by covers. The artist’s radically formalist gesture towards the sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s paradoxically reveals a fundamental contradiction: the presence of modernist art in the contemporary context is impossible.
Vadim Abramovich Sidur (1924–1986) was a Soviet sculptor and a leading figure of Soviet modernism. In the Second World War he got a devastating injury, and his face was severely disfigured. Sidur’s best-known sculptures deal with the themes of violence, the Holocaust and repression. In his creative method, he used the minimum means, striving to create concise, symbolic sculptures by shaping their forms with literally just a few movements of his hands. In his lifetime, he was unable to showcase his sculptures in the USSR.
However, his sculptures were installed in Germany. At the of Perestroika, Sidur’s first solo exhibition proved so popular with the public that it was turned into a permanent exhibition and later into a museum.
