Yevgeniy Fiks: Ayn Rand in Drawings

Opening Reception for Yevgeniy Fiks, author of the artist book Moscow, forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse (2011).
Yevgeniy Fiks
Ayn Rand in Illustrations
June 18 – July 30, 2010
Opens June 18 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Winkleman Gallery
621 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
Ground Floor
Between 11th and 12th Avenues
www.winkleman.com

Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present “Ayn Rand in
Illustrations,” our second solo exhibition by Russian-born, New
York-based artist Yevgeniy Fiks. Continuing Fiks’ exploration of
repressed micro-historical narratives that highlight the complex
relationships between social histories of the West and Russia in the
20th century, “Ayn Rand in Illustrations” presents a suite of large
works on paper in watercolor, ink, and pencil. This first exhibition
from Fiks’ ongoing series examining the uncanny resemblance between
Rand’s aesthetics and that of Soviet Socialist Realist Art presents
works referencing Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged.

Author Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum, better known in the US as Ayn
Rand, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905. As a teenager, Rand
saw the Russian Revolution unfolding from her bedroom window on the
city’s largest avenue Nevsky Prospect. Shortly thereafter, her
father’s pharmacy was nationalized and her family’s hardships began.
According to Rand, she had rejected the Revolution from the outset and
spent her teens and early twenties in a self-imposed “internal
emigration,” finding escape in 19th century romantic literature. Rand
left Russia for the United States in 1926, when the aesthetics that
became later known as “Socialist Realism” were just in the process of
formation.

For each of these drawings, Fiks and his studio combined sections of
Rand’s prose (as they appear on the page in his copy of Atlas
Shrugged, including the page number) with images of Soviet Socialist
Realist paintings and sculptures, found in art books and magazines.
Each letter of the text was rendered, as was the image of the painting
or sculpture in grisaille. In the artist’s own words, “The Capitalist
utopia of Ayn Rand and Communist utopia of Stalin become symbiotic and
interchangeable in this project. The two ideologies rely on the same
approach of representation through propaganda, idealization,
romanticization, glorification, etc. “Ayn Rand in Illustrations”
exposes the mechanics of Rand’s aesthetics and that of Socialist
Realism indiscriminately. Through the juxtaposition, Socialist Realism
and Ayn Rand effectively cancel each other: while Socialist Realist
imagery become possible illustrations for Ayn Rand, Socialist Realist
Art appears to be only useful today as illustrations for Ayn Rand’s
writings.”

Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has been living and
working in New York since 1994. Fiks has produced many projects on the
subject of the Post-Soviet dialog in the West, among them: “Lenin for
Your Library?” in which he mailed V.I. Lenin’s text “Imperialism: The
Highest Stage of Capitalism” to one hundred global corporations as a
donation for their corporate libraries; “Communist Party USA,” a
series of portraits of current members of Communist Party USA, painted
from life in the Party’s national headquarters in New York City; and
“Communist Guide to New York City,” a series of photographs of
buildings and public places in New York City that are connected to the
history of the American Communist movement. Fiks’ work has been shown
internationally, including solo exhibitions at Winkleman Gallery and
Common Room 2, both in New York (USA); Contemporary City Foundation,
Marat Guelman Gallery, and ARTStrelka Projects in Moscow, and the
State Museum of Russian Political History, St. Petersburg (Russia);
and the Lenin-Museo, Tampere (Finland). His work has been included in
the Biennale of Sydney (2008); Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary
Art (2007); and Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2009, 2007 and
2005).

For more information, please contact Edward Winkleman at 212.643.3152
or info@winkleman.com.