Acrylic

Pop art influenced portrait of Vladimir Lenin holding an object up towards the viewer. At the top of the composition is the coke-a-cola logo rewritten to read cocaine. The work is signed by the artist and dated. The canvas is not framed.

Igor Baskakov received a very traditional art training, in portraits, drawing, and landscapes, but his work subverts that tradition. He grew up during the period of Perestroika, when the West its politics, its business, its culture was just beginning the assault on the USSR. As a student Baskakov worked with the Union of Soviet Poster Artists, the industrial arts group that had once been one of the most influential manipulators of communist ideology. Baskakov was at the very centre of this maelstrom, working on the side of Communism while experiencing the onslaught of Capitalism. His work subsumes these two opposing ideologies; he takes the advertising logos and slogans of Western multinationals and refashions them in the Soviet propaganda style. The result appears to be a joke at first, like Warhol's soup cans, but what it says about the end of an empire is still painful for many Russians, and its commentary on the new empire of Capitalism is perhaps not so funny even for the invading Westerners.

H 23.5 in. x W 23.5 in. x D 1 in.