erik bulatov
freiheit ist freiheit | freedom is freedom
24 feruary to 28 may 2006
Erik Bulatov (born in 1933 in Swerdlowsk in the Ural Mountains) numbers, along with Ilya Kabakov, among a small but significant group of Russian artists who, at a remove from the governmental regulations of the Soviet art system, attained completely independent forms of artistic expression. In an extensive exhibition devoted to this artist, who today lives in Paris, the kestnergesellschaft is presenting twenty large-format paintings, and it is also displaying for the first time a selection of his drawings.
In the isolation of the 1960s to 1980s, Bulatov developed a visual language which, first of all, revives and updates the avant-gardist aesthetic of Russian Constructivism from the early twentieth century and, secondly, represents a critical encounter with the state-imposed socialist realism and propaganda aesthetic of the Soviet Union. As a rule, he works with two pictorial levels. Realistic depictions of people, landscapes or urban scenes are set in relation to words, in such a manner that the writing and pictorial signification seemingly complement each other and at the same time stand in mutual contradiction. Bulatov’s handling of typography is clearly nourished by his involvement with the aesthetic vocabulary of Russian Constructivism. He reverses, however, its autonomous and abstract visual language into its opposite, into a concrete and almost legible typography which often assumes the character of concrete poetry.