Mikhail Magaril

Art Brokerage: Mikhail Magaril Russian Artist: b. 1950. The vital and diverse artistic output of Mikhail Magaril is a successful combination of the rebellious aesthetics of the Russian avant-garde of the early 1900's, the linguistic ambiguities of the early Soviet absurdist literature and the critically-minded playfulness of British and American Pop art of the 1970s. The pureness of color and elegance and simplicity of the outline in his work reveal a distinct influence of the preeminent Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, pioneer of geometric abstract art and originator of the influential Suprematism movement. An academically trained graphic artist, Magaril draws extensively on the visual culture of the Soviet avant-garde book illustration, where meaningful arrangements of the image and typography underscore daring linguistic experiments of poets and writers. The deceptive straightforwardness of the message is the artist's tribute to the didactic aesthetics of Soviet propaganda posters. In his unorthodox reinterpretation of the historical context combined with rare technical refinement, Magaril revisits the theoretical and artistic principles of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Vehement rejection or denunciation of the Soviet ideology is altogether absent from Magaril's work. The artist pays a highly personal tongue-in-cheek tribute to the merits of the socialist utopia. His affectionate warm-hearted nostalgia strongly manifests itself through constant reinvention of children's reading tutorials, coloring books and puzzles and frequent integration of the found objects into the canvas. At the same time, he cautiously introduces the elements of the grotesque, the subconscious and the absurd into the idyllic realm of his rhetorical characters. Listings wanted.