Frozen Dreams: Contemporary Art from Russia

🔖 Frozen Dreams is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary art from Russia. Culturally and geographically thought of as part of Europe while at the same time a vast country stretching over nine time zones, Russia is a major world power with seemingly endless natural resources and undeniable political significance. How has Russia’s rapidly changing political and economic landscape shaped its art? And how does art affect social and cultural change within Russia?


Parsing the rich legacy of its past, when the country’s artists were counted among the world’s foremost avant-gardists, today’s practitioners draw on unique sources of creative inspiration as they engage in a critical dialogue with artists elsewhere. For example, the resurgence of Orthodox Christianity, with its great icon-painting tradition and its spiritual and cultural roots deep in Byzantium, can be seen as one of the vital forces shaping contemporary practice. In addition, the continuous recycling and reinvestigation of Suprematist geometry by several generations of artists have foregrounded distinctly Russian conceptual and stylistic concerns.


Frozen Dreams presents a selection of more than eighty Russian artists working from the 1970s into the present. Alongside well-established names such as Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Eric Bulatov, Boris Mikhailov and AES+F, many newcomers are introduced, including Alexei Kallima, Kerim Ragimov and Olga Chernysheva. The book features diverse media and styles ranging from traditional painting, drawing and sculpture to photography, film, installation, and photographic documentation of performance art and new media.


Featuring more than 580 high-quality colour illustrations, insightful interviews with collectors, in-depth profiles and three essays by leading scholars, Frozen Dreams is an essential guide to a subject that has been under-researched. Through representatives of all the main movements, including the Moscow Conceptual school and Sots Art, Frozen Dreams brings together artists from the Soviet underground and those working today in the wake of perestroika, when the official/unofficial divide has given way to greater diversity and artistic freedom.