NYAB Event - Mikhail Magaril "Utopia Amiss"

Mikhail Magaril "Utopia Amiss"

Mimi Ferzt Gallery

This event has ended.

The exhibition features oil paintings, archival prints and sculptures as well as hand – made books …..by the artist. Magaril’s artistic output is the product of various influences ranging from early Soviet avant-garde illustration to American Pop-art of the 1970’s. Highly diverse in media, format and subject-matter, the works represent the artist’s unorthodox view s on tradition, history, language and a fate of an individual seen through the prism of the Soviet cultural and political symbolism. Combining a derisive version of the Communist imagery with the graphic principles of socialist propaganda, Magaril explores the nuances of the complicated operation of the socio-political system and its relationship with its human constituents. The artist draws on indi genous Russian concepts to portray such salient aspects of private and public spheres as man and nature, ideology and children, conformity and individualism.
Utopia Amiss embraces the entire scope of Magaril’s incisive humor, ranging from such purely comical productions as Hooray from Stalin (2010, wood, acrylic), a wooden pink-hued figure of a once-dreaded oppressor, to the sarcastic visual commentary on the pervasive myth of high morality of the Communist leaders as in Lenin in Paris (2010, archival digital print). In Aurora (1991, oil on canvas), the great illusion, impersonalized by the famed battleship, goes up in smokes flanked by the profiles of its most renowned leaders. Lenin’s idealistic idea of converting the backward Russia into a highly industrialized state by means of overall electrification is monumentalized in Lampochka Ilyicha (2010, glass, epoxy), an imaginary headstone that combines the leader’s mask with the elements of a light bulb. In A Friend of the Guard (1987, oil on canvas), a pack of cigarettes becomes a symbol of the Soviet multilayered hypocrisy. Palace of Culture (2010, archival digital print), featuring a gilded statue of Lenin propped in the foreground of one of the fallacious symbols of foregone epoch, demonstrates the artist understated lament over the demise of the great illusion.

Born in Leningrad in 1950, Mikhail Magaril received his degree from the Moscow Printing Institute. Like many other unofficial Soviet artists, Magaril made his living as a book illustrator collaborating with leading Leningrad publishing houses. In 1990, Mikhail Magaril immigrated to the United States. In 1991, he began working at the Center for Book Arts, New York. In 1998, Magaril founded Summer Garden Editions, a private press devoted to limited editions of his livres d`artiste. The most recent exhibition of his paintings was held at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia. Mikhail Magaril’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, the State Hermitage Museum as well as book collections of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, Yale, Harvard and Cornell Universities, the British National Library, the Russian National Library and numerous private collections.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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