Komar & Melamid — artists (sots art) with roots in the USSR
Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid are Russian-American conceptual artists who co-invented Sots Art — Soviet Pop Art — in Moscow in the early 1970s, were expelled from the Artists' Union, and emigrated to New York in 1978. Their People's Choice project — polling citizens of different countries on their ideal painting — became a landmark of conceptual art.
Tracing the roots — Moscow
Born in Moscow in 1943 (Komar) and 1945 (Melamid), they met at Moscow's Stroganov Institute and developed their satirical commentary on Soviet ideology in secret. Their emigration to New York and their subsequent career — deconstructing American consumer culture with the same tools they used on Soviet culture — made them unique bridges between the two worlds.
Moscow. At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.