Vitaly Komar and Robert Storr in Conversation: Ethan Cohen Gallery, 225 West 17th Street, New York, NY

Please join Ethan Cohen Gallery on Wednesday, June 3, at 6 PM for a conversation between artist Vitaly Komar and curator, critic, and artist Robert Storr, held on the final day of Vitaly Komar | Three Day Weekend: Tomorrow Is Not Guaranteed.  

Bringing together two major figures in contemporary art, the conversation will consider Komar’s long engagement with history, ideology, satire, authorship, and the afterlives of Soviet visual culture. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition, the discussion will offer an opportunity to reflect on Komar’s artistic evolution, from his groundbreaking work with Komar & Melamid to his later independent practice, and on the enduring relevance of political imagination, absurdity, and moral ambiguity in art today.

Vitaly Komar is a Moscow-born artist and one of the founding figures of Sots Art, the Soviet dissident movement that merged the visual language of Socialist Realism with the strategies of Pop and Conceptual Art. Together with Alexander Melamid, Komar developed a radical body of work that critiqued propaganda, authorship, ideology, and cultural authority through painting, performance, installation, public projects, and conceptual actions. After emigrating from the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, Komar continued to shape the international discourse around political art, irony, and the collapse of grand historical narratives. His work has been exhibited internationally and remains central to the history of postwar and contemporary conceptual practice.

Robert Storr is an artist, critic, curator, and writer. He served as curator and then senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1990 to 2002, where he organized major exhibitions on artists including Gerhard Richter, Max Beckmann, Elizabeth Murray, Robert Ryman, and Tony Smith. He was the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and served as Dean of the Yale School of Art from 2006 to 2016. In 2007, Storr was Artistic Director of the Venice Biennale, becoming the first American invited to direct the international exhibition. He remains one of the most influential voices in contemporary art criticism and curatorial thought.