- Artist
- Viktor Pivovarov born 1937
- Part of
- Apartment 22
- Original title
- Govorit Moskva ...
- Medium
- Enamel paint on canvas on fibreboard
- Dimensions
- Support: 1122 × 832 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for Russian Art, supported by V-A-C Foundation 2017
- Reference
- T14798
Summary
This is Radio Moscow … 1992–6 is a painting in enamel on canvas mounted on fibreboard. It combines image and text, presented in a comic book style. The painting depicts an apartment room at twilight rendered primarily in dark blue. A door opens into the room, through which a view of the sun setting behind a neighbouring apartment building, painted in a bright yellow, is visible. On a table in the foreground are a lit lamp painted in a slightly darker yellow, an open book and a half-drunk glass of tea. The Russian text that runs along the bottom of the painting and gives the work its title provides an exact time for the scene, relaying an announcement on an unseen radio: ‘This is Radio Moscow. The time in Moscow is 19 hours 30 minutes. The next show is “Theatre at the Microphone”…’ The text and objects suggest the recent presence of the apartment’s resident. However, the human figure is absent, an omission accentuated by a partly obscured portrait hanging on the wall, which shows the outline of a male bust with a blank face. Despite the seemingly innocuous and tranquil setting, these absences suggest a sense of unease and menace.
The painting is from Pivovarov’s series of thirty-five paintings Apartment 22 (Kvartira 22) and its features are characteristic of the series as a whole. The series was produced between 1992 and 1996 in Prague, the city to which the artist emigrated in 1982. The title Apartment 22 is a reference to the Moscow communal apartment where Pivovarov lived with his mother as a child. Most of the scenes are set inside the apartment building and several contain the image of the mother and the young Viktor. While Pivovarov generally excludes specific period references in these works, he has clarified that the setting is ‘Moscow in the 1950s as [my] own memory can remember it’ (Pivovarov in conversation with Tate curator Antonio Geusa, November 2014).
While elements of the stories told in Apartment 22 are based on Pivovarov’s personal recollections of daily life in the post-war Soviet Union, the characters, objects and text in the paintings are not directly autobiographical. Instead they are based on extracts from a fictional diary written by the artist. The diary recounts the experiences of his invented character Grigory Sergeevich Tatuzov, an impoverished musician living with his partner Mariya in one of the rooms of Apartment 22. The glass on the table in This is Radio Moscow… is one of several objects depicted in the series which are specifically mentioned by Grigory in his fictional diary. The diary takes the form of notebooks which survive as physical objects. The quotidian theme of the series is complemented by Pivovarov’s use of domestic materials such as enamel paint.
Pivovarov was one of the founders of Moscow conceptualism, the underground art movement that emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. The Apartment 22 series is one of his most famous works and incorporates key characteristics of his practice. The series has been extensively exhibited as individual works, in groups, and occasionally in its entirety, including in Pivovarov’s retrospective exhibitions at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, in 2004, at the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, in 2004, and at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2005 and 2011. Pivovarov was also part of the Sretensky Boulevard Group, a loosely associated community of artists with neighbouring studios in the Russian capital that included Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov. Like many of the Soviet nonconformist artists Pivovarov also maintained a career as an official artist, and he was a respected and popular illustrator of children’s books and magazines. This experience is reflected in the style of Apartment 22, where simplistic design belies an allegory that exposes the underlying mechanisms of Soviet society.
Although created in the 1990s Apartment 22 epitomises the ethos of Moscow conceptualism. Towards the end of the 1980s after a period in the late 1970s and 1980s in which he focused more on geometric abstraction and surrealism, Pivovarov returned to producing work more closely linked to his earlier practice. The focus upon the private lives of fictional Russian citizens forced to undergo communal living is a theme that he shared with his close friend Kabakov. This exemplifies Pivovarov’s belief that ‘the stronger the pressure from the outside, the greater the intensity of inner life’ (Pivovarov in conversation with Tate curator Antonio Geusa, November 2014). In Apartment 22 Pivovarov also follows his work of the mid-1970s that focused on the theme of loneliness. The artist has described his characters as experiencing the ‘fourth level of loneliness … the attaining of a true freedom and the joining with the infinite’ (quoted in Rosenfeld and Dodge 1995, p.321).
The intricate combination of image and text, particularly in the context of the mundanity of Soviet existence, is a defining characteristic of Moscow conceptualism. In the Apartment 22 paintings the letters are made to look like rudimentary stencils on a noticeboard of the kind encountered daily by Soviet citizens. The ambiguous relationship to reality is also a key aspect of Moscow conceptualism. While the series is based on a fictional diary, factual references are woven into the narratives, and this false sense of reality highlights the often surreal quality of life in the Soviet Union. Rather than providing an idealised account of life – a feature of the official Soviet art of socialist realism – Apartment 22 focuses on what is missing from life. Pivovarov has stated: ‘Mine is not a nostalgic look at my personal past. I would rather say that “melancholy” is the key word to a better understanding of the whole series.’ (Pivovarov in conversation with Tate curator Antonio Geusa, November 2014.)
Two other paintings from Apartment 22 are held in Tate’s collection, (He) Hit Me with a Hammer and Burst into Tears 1992 (Tate T14797) and It Was Dark on the Stairs … 1992–6 (Tate T14799). In the former, the setting is again an apartment room, peopled by two women sitting at a table. In the latter the text that provides the work with its title becomes the entire image of the painting, a device used a number of times throughout the series.
Further reading
Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge (eds.), Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience, 1956–1986, New York 1995.
Viktor Pivovarov, Oni, Moscow 2011, reproduced p.22.
Ekaterina Allenova and Peter Spinella (eds.), Viktor Pivovarov, vol.1, Moscow 2014, reproduced pp.173, 179.
Julia Tatiana Bailey and Antonio Geusa
January 2015
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.
Explore
- emotions, concepts and ideas(16,416)
-
- emotions and human qualities(5,345)
- universal concepts(6,387)
- domestic(1,795)
-
- living room(292)
- electrical appliances(404)
-
- radio(41)
- picture(248)
- table(754)
- light / lamp(264)
- cities, towns, villages (non-UK)(13,323)
-
- Moscow(15)
- Russia(46)
- lifestyle and culture(10,247)
-
- community(4)
- dystopia(13)
- inscriptions(6,664)
-
- caption(358)
- Cyrillic text(9)
- Russian text(4)