The Ludwig Forum for International Art is home to around 1,800 paintings, sculptures, and works of the graphic arts from the former Soviet Union and central, eastern, and southeastern Europe which Irene and Peter Ludwig collected between 1979 and 1996. Fragments of a reality that once was marks the launch of a re-examination, re-positioning, and new exploration of sections of this collection which in the past were inventoried under the category “Art from the USSR” and about which there is little information down to the present day. Moreover, the respective works and artistic positions will be re-contextualized in relationship to current art and cultural discourses, an approach facilitating a critical inquiry into the prevailing Western perspective on “Eastern European art.” This first exhibition of the research project of the same name considers a series of art works which are connected in various ways with Ukraine. The exhibition undertakes a revision, examining the vague and imprecise categorizations, terminologies, and contextualizing narratives–whether they be geographical, political, or art historical–with the aim to do justice to the diversity and complexity of a region most recently racked by tension and violence.

That this requires changing established viewing habits is evident in the very first room of the exhibition, where works from the 1970s and 1980s are presented which, at first glance, seem to belong to the Classical Modernism of the 19th and early 20th centuries. They were created in response to the doctrine of Socialist Realism, which prescribed that art was to serve the sole purpose of justifying progress towards a communist society. Against this background, the seemingly anachronistic paintings of countryside idylls like Family in Donbas (1970) by Arkadiy Petrov and Gurzuf (1972) by Yuriy Lutskevych unfold their emancipatory potential. The withdrawal into the private sphere and to remote places, beyond the grasp of the central government, was characteristic of the subversive undermining of this normative doctrine. In a conscious turn away from the official aim of unifying all artistic production under the sign of communism, the retreat into a private domain and the drawing of inspiration from national patriotic motifs within the individual Soviet republics were typical forms of an–albeit defensive–artistic resistance.

The exhibition also explores the legacy of the “Russian avantgarde.” Paintings by Oleksandr Tyshler from the 1960s and 1970s reveal the universal character of the avantgarde and the subsequent metaphysical-figurative painting of the early 20th century, demonstrating how the aesthetic and revolutionary programs became a pivotal reference point for many later artists in the Soviet era. In turn, the large-format works of Leonid Voytsekhov Angling Season (1989) and End of the Performance (1987) are key examples of a pictorial language, widespread in Ukrainian contemporary art at the end of the 1980s, that engages, at times ironically, with an already disintegrating Soviet Union.