Vitaly Komar | Three Day Weekend: Tomorrow Is Not Guaranteed: The KuBe Art Center, Beacon, NY

Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center is pleased to present Three Day Weekend, a solo exhibition by Vitaly Komar. A sequel to Komar’s exhibition that was held in Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York City earlier in the year, this exhibition offers further insight into the artist’s oeuvre. The Komar and Melamid works on view are from the V. Komar Collection.

The exhibition traces a renowned artist’s philosophical and aesthetic arc toward reconciliation with a life spent wrestling with public issues. Its title envisions a rapprochement among the three Abrahamic religions, so often at odds, each with its own day of worship. Across these works, Komar considers the power of symbols to command belief, sustain authority, and convey the private experience of faith.

Vitaly Komar, formerly the partner of the famous artist duo Komar and Melamid enters his third decade of solo independence. Komar co-founded the Soviet Pop Art movement Sots Art with Alex Melamid. Their subversive treatment of Soviet propaganda extended, following their emigration, to the imagery of American consumer culture. Komar’s subsequent work carries this inquiry into the realm of the sacred, exploring how religious devotion and political allegiance become entangled, and how symbols might recover meaning beyond their public misuse.

The Beacon presentation includes collage maquettes and sketches for Naked Revolution, a 1997 opera by composer Dave Soldier in collaboration with Komar and Melamid. Commissioned for the 25th anniversary of The Kitchen in New York, with a libretto by Maita di Niscemi, the opera follows a Russian taxi driver whose dreams are haunted by George Washington and Lenin. Komar and Melamid designed the sets, bringing their longstanding engagement with political icons into the space of theatrical fantasy.

Throughout the exhibition, satire gives way to moments of intimacy and contemplation. Komar’s search for sacred authenticity emerges from decades of questioning received beliefs, opening toward the possibility of renewed wonder.

The legendary partnership of Komar and Melamid effectively ceased collaborating some 20 years ago. They had made history in the Soviet Union as part of a public art demo that got bulldozed, after launching the caustically dissident Sots-Art movement, then migrated to New York via Israel in 1977. Here they promptly found ways to provoke the public eye with a debut show at the famed Ronald Feldman gallery, by evanescing ironically at the Factory with Warhol and regularly flouting the review pages of the New York Times over the years. “We are not a team; we are a movement” was a resounding quote that echoed convincingly through their era of prominence.

Their dance with history, art history, their flirting against authority, including the traditional Russian worship of religious icons latterly transmuted into Socialist poster art, became a subversive iconoclasm toward all received assumption. In America, they recognized echoes of propaganda art and the presence of false gods in popular consumerist imagery. What Warhol celebrated with only a droplet of irony they deconstructed fully into symbols of multilayered irreverence. And so, in the 1990s, they launched ‘The People’s Choice’ project dedicated to envisioning art based on data from popular polls in countries across the world.

In the end, the duo diverged according to their true instincts. Melamid’s Duchampian rejectionism led to honorable stasis and withdrawal. Komar’s exploration of corrupted worship symbols led him to seek for sacred authenticity. Komar’s works are never private or merely personal. His oeuvre did, after all, begin with the satirizing of Soviet propaganda posters. Hence the depiction of Putin, Trump, and Xi as the scary substitutes for Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in ‘The New Yalta’, a de sublimated vision of the famous original photograph.

Yet Komar’s paintings, for all their public stance, often possess a powerful intimacy and insularity. We see it in works like ‘The Trinity’ where the private experience of religious devotion and suffering is evoked intensely, the more so to suggest the dangers of its public misuse - prostration before the icon as it miscegenates into the iconic. The feeling of sacred interiority conveys the compressed moment  where art, tradition, faith and wonder converge. Its ideation, or indeed objectification, is encapsulated by Komar in his famous ‘Circle, Square, Triangle’, originally conceived in 1975. 

At that time, the painting was intended as an abstraction representing the naive veneration of symbols, a blind worship of idols. Now luminous and arresting, its meaning has permutated down the years to keep pace with Komar’s own search for an exit from self-defeating irony. Viewed through the transmutation of time within the artist and out among us, it has arrived at a radical new innocence and significance, as does all great art.

About The KuBe Art Center:

Established in 2011, The KuBe (Kunsthalle Beacon) is a 127,000 square foot art center located in Beacon New York at the site of a former high school. The KuBe Art Center includes the Joan Lebold Cohen and Jerome A. Cohen Center for Visual Arts, The Chongmao and Zheng Ruyu Theater, which hosts experimental community film, theater, and dance projects. Additionally, The Kube provides 48 artists' studios, and commercial office spaces which have hosted a variety of community-based business ranging from puppeteers to political campaign headquarters. In 2023 the KuBe Art Center received The Arts Mid-Hudson Arts Organization Executive Arts Award. We wish to extend an invitation to you to join the Hudson Valley community in Beacon to discover our emerging incubator and visit exhibitions of internationally acclaimed artists in our expansive galleries.

About Ethan Cohen Gallery

From the very beginning, Ethan Cohen Gallery has represented a pioneering blend of both emerging and internationally renowned artists. Many of the emerging artists have now become household names. Mr. Cohen has steered the gallery to occupy a distinct place in contemporary art as a center of innovation across disciplines and countries. Today Ethan Cohen Gallery has three gallery locations, two in Chelsea in the heart of New York City and the other in Beacon, New York. 

Ethan Cohen first founded his gallery in 1987 as Art Waves/Ethan Cohen in SoHo, New York. A groundbreaker in the field of contemporary Chinese art, Ethan Cohen was the first gallerist to present the Chinese Avant-Garde of the 1980s to the United States. Ethan Cohen Gallery today represents a diverse global mix of contemporary and post-war contemporary art, specializing in contemporary Asian art and contemporary African art.

Press Contacts: Donna Mikkelsen – donna@ecfa.com | Lara Kamhi - lara@ecfa.com

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