Dubossarsky and Vinogradov
In the middle of 1990-s, amid the ruins of the Soviet system, pepped up by the breeze of unlimited freedom, two men set out to build up a New Russian Paradise. Two decades later they ascended to the Olympus of the most expensive living contemporary Russian artists, with record prices at Sotheby’s and Philips de Pury.
The legendary Moscow duo, Vladimir Dubossarsky (°1964) and Alexander Vinogradov (°1963) are called ‘artists of the generation’. No coincidence, their works appear on the covers of books by postmodernist writer Victor Pelevin, the author of the cult novel ‘Generation P’, which describes the formation of new capitalist businessmen, former members of Komsomol, who would rule the new state.
‘P’ stands in the title for ‘Pepsi’, the symbol of desired Western world’s material happiness, absorbed, like by a sponge, by those, who would form the country’s first business, political and media elite.
‘It was a time of deep economic crisis and disastrous infrastructural decline, when art, withdrawn into a narrow tight knit community, inhabited the institutional ruins of the previous era lying prone by the wayside of the direction that society was moving in.
It was precisely then that the new prospects for art were formulated in unison with the new challenges for society as defined by the liberal reformers. And it was precisely at this time that Dubossarsky and Vinogradov’s project was fully formulated’.
