Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were born in Moscow, Russia; Komar on 11 September 1943 and Melamid on 14 July 1945. They both studied at the Moscow Art School from 1958–60 and the Stroganov Institute of Art and Design, graduating in 1967, the year in which they held their first joint exhibition. They subsequently joined the Moscow Union of Artists and took up teaching posts. However, the controversial nature of their works resulted in arrest in 1974 and both immigrated first to Israel in 1977, and then to New York, in 1978.
Although their co-authorship of artworks ceased in 2003–4, Komar and Melamid are two of the best known artists to emerge from the USSR in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the founders in 1972 of the controversial SotsArt, a type of work which fused Russian Socialist Realism with elements of conceptual art, Western Pop Art and Dada. ‘We are not just an artist. We are a movement’ they famously declared, never precisely defining the role each played within the creation of any individual artwork.
