The project “Picasso – USSR” is the first gallery exhibition in Russia of the artist and writer, Vagrich Bakhchanyan (b. 1938), one of the legendary representatives of the Soviet underground, who emigrated from the USSR (since 1974 has been living in New York). The majority know of him as the author of what have become popular expressions “We are born in order to make Kafka a reality”, “The wallet is the weapon of the proletariat” and many others, but for the art world Bakhchanyan is, above all, the direct successor of classical Russian Avant-garde, rightly considered one of the “fathers” of Sots-art and Moscow conceptualism. His books and projects, filled with subtle absurd humour, allowed the critics to speak of him as “the only Dadaist in our contemporary art”. In recent years Bakhchanyan’s works have set records at the most prominent auctions and have been shown in Russia and abroad in such exhibitions, as “Sots-art” and “Adventures of the Black square”, but in the pop/off/art Gallery the artist, for the first time, has brought about a project, combining one of his most well-known series of collages with new age digital technologies.

The series “Picasso – USSR” consists of 34 medium-sized collages, made mainly in 1984 (this series with lengthy breaks continued up to 2005). In it, in the form of reproductions from magazines and albums, are combined the masterpieces of Picasso and the most well-known images of the Soviet epoch – sots-realistic pictures, sculptures, agitation-posters. The result is the ironic clash of opposed cultures: the bourgeois and the socialist, the modernist and realist, the unique, extremely individualized and the mass produced. “Picasso – USSR” is the mutual gravitation and repulsion of two incompatible worlds, maximally strengthened by the communist orientation of Picasso himself and resulting from this the necessity of his recognition by the Soviet establishment. In the typical sots-art collages of Bakhchanyan all the contradictions and preferences of the XX century are exposed, and today they are perceived as the witty and brilliant analysis of the impulses and phobias of a passed epoch.

12 of the 34 works have been especially printed in large format for the exhibition, having been called upon to strengthen the informational, mass-produced nature of these collages, echoes of their time. Their humour and the sharpness of their meanings have remained relevant for almost quarter of a century.