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Untitled
Untitled
© The Dmitri Prigov Foundation. Photo by Peter Paul Geoffrion.

Untitled

Artist (Born in Moscow, Russia (formerly the USSR), 1940–2007)
Datec. 1980s
MediumPrint on vellum with enamel
DimensionsSheet: 23 7/8 x 18 inches (60.6 x 45.7 cm)
ClassificationsPrint
Credit LineGift of Dmitri Prigov
Object number1995.18.1.E
Collections
  • MODERN & CONTEMPORARY
  • RUSSIAN
  • WORKS ON PAPER
StateArtist’s proof
Label TextConceptual artist, poet, performer, and musician Dmitri Prigov frequently combined creative methods in his work as a leader of the Soviet artistic underground in the 1970s and ‘80s. A series he made in the 1980s used the newspaper Pravda (Правда), the official voice of the Soviet Communist Party, as a surface for analyzing both image and text. In Untitled, the hammer and sickle—a proletarian symbol of unity between the worker and peasant—grow larger, as a painted red dot gets smaller then abruptly expands to contain the Russian word for “the end.” The forms float above a black hole-like space that eventually swallows up both text and image. Prigov’s serial print upends the primacy of the word in Russian culture, while also drawing parallels between the artist’s homeland and the United States, where Russia frequently appears in the daily news cycle.