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Art of the 20th Century
Grisha Bruskin
Grisha Bruskin
Grisha Bruskin was born in 1945 in Moscow. Like the majority of Jews of his generation in the Soviet Union he was growing up in complete ignorance of his Jewish heritage until he started studying Jewish tradition in the 70s. Until today the myth of Judaism and the myth of communism have remained his two central topics which he treats in series of paintings and sculptures. Bruskin is ranking among the most celebrated contemporary Russian artists, since his works achieved sensational results at the 1988 auction of Sotheby's in Moscow.
Parallel to painting (his most renown works are the Alefbet and Fundamental Lexicon series and the monumental triptych Life Over All in the Berlin Reichstag) Bruskin develops traditional arts and crafts techniques as artistic media. In the style of Soviet chinaware (which was often employed to convey propagandistic statements) he created for instance the cycles Alphabetic Truths (34 porcelain plates, 1998) or Life is Everywhere (25 porcelain sculptures, 1998-99). With On the Edge his present series of bronze sculptures Bruskin returns to larger sculptures. By pursuing motives from Soviet monuments, which were omni-present during his youth and had already inspired paintings from the late 70s on, he investigates with subtle irony the complex implications of depiction and deliverance.
Bruskin's complex work does not only scrutinize the significant myths of Judaism and the Soviet Union but also refers to the problem of alienation of the individual from the society and his vulnerability to the catastrophe and transitoriness of cultural contexts.
