Three-Day Weekend.

June 18 – July 29, 2005

RONALD FELDMAN GALLERY
31 Mercer Street
Phone: (212) 226-3232
Fax: (212) 941-1536
NYC, NY 10013
Hours: Tues.-Sat., 10-6 pm, Mon. by appointment

Please visit Ronald Feldman Gallery on the web.
For more information about the exhibit, please visit us here and here.

VITALY KOMAR
Three-Day Weekend
Brief Description of Project.

The Three-Day Weekend , for me, is a symbol of the peaceful coexistence of different peoples and different concepts of faith and spirituality: Friday for Muslims, Saturday for Jews, and Sunday for Christians.

The idea to create ecumenical symbols in the form of Universal Mandalas originated in my childhood dreams, and continues the search of the nonconformist art of my youth. In these mandalas, I unite ancient symbols of spirituality with historical and personal images (see Artist’s Statement).

At some point during my work with photographs of me and my parents, a face—mine or one of the others—appeared in the center of some of the mandalas. These accidents gave me the idea of making painted and stained glass panels with a hole or a mirror in the center of the mandala. Visitors who’d like to participate in this project can place their faces in the opening of certain mandalas, or see their reflection in the mirror in the others. I will photograph them with a Polaroid camera and make ID-like, pocket-sized mandala portraits. In this way, spectators can establish a personal connection with eternal symbols of spirituality and the concept of the Three-Day Weekend. I invite everybody to make an appointment.

The exhibition and publication of these symbols will be the initial step in the creation and promotion of a not-for-profit Three-Day Weekend Society.

Vitaly Komar: Brief Biography

Vitaly Komar was born in Moscow, USSR in 1943, graduated from the Stroganov School of Art and Design in 1967, and has been living in New York since 1978. He was one of the founders of the Sots Art movement (soviet Pop/Conceptual art) and a pioneer of multi-stylistic post-modernism (1972-73).

Vitaly Komar worked in collaboration with Alex Melamid from 1973 to 2003. In 1974, he was arrested during a performance of Art Belongs to the People and later, on September 15th, his and A. Melamid’s work along with the works of other non-conformist artists was destroyed by Soviet Authorities at the open-air Bulldozer Exhibition.

Komar and Melamid can be found in Oxford’s Dictionary of 20th Century Art; The Penguin Concise Dictionary of Art History; Art since the 40’s; Bildende Kunst im 20 Jahrhundert; Bordas’ Petit Dictionnaire Des Artistes Contemporains; Art in the Modern Era; and Phaidon’s The 20th-Century Art Book. Their work is included in major art museums across the world.

They collaborated with the conceptual video artist Douglas Davis on Questions New York/Moscow in 1976 (collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); with Fluxus musician Charlotte Moorman on Passport in 1976 (Ronald Feldman Gallery); with Pop Artist Andy Warhol on We Buy and Sell Souls in 1978-79 (private collection, Moscow); with dozens of artists and Soviet monuments on Monumental Propaganda in 1993 (traveling show, Independent Curators Inc.); with the masses and Marttila & Kiley Poll Company on Most Wanted and Most Unwanted Paintings in 1994; with composer Dave Soldier on an opera about Washington, Lenin and Duchamp, Naked Revolution in 1997 (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and The Kitchen, New York);with painter Renee the elephant in 1995 and with photographer Mikki the Chimpanzee in 1998 (Russian pavilion at Venice Biennale, 1999).

After the Symbols of the Big Bang (quest for spirituality in science and natural forces) exhibited at the Yeshiva University Museum (New York, 2002-03) the artist started the Three-Day Weekend uniting symbols of different faiths and concepts of spirituality with childhood photographs of him and his parents. This deeply personal work marked the end of his collaboration with Alex Melamid, but the artist understands the concept of artistic collaboration very broadly. “I continue collaborating with art history” said Vitaly Komar, “with the nonconformist art of my youth and its unfulfilled dreams and experiments.”