The Artist

Georgy Frangulyan (b. Tbilisi, 1945) is a post-War Russian artist who occupies a unique place in the history of late-Soviet : post-Soviet art. His family, members of the educated Communist elites, moved to Moscow in 1956. There, Frangulyan experienced art in a rapidly evolving, post-Stalinist context. First was ground-breaking Picasso exhibition of 1956, which was followed by the exceptionally important American National exhibition of 1959. 

Frangulyan was accepted into Moscow’s highly competitive Stroganov Academy in 1964, from which he graduated in 1969. During his studies he continued to see an enormous range of art, far beyond what was considered Socialist Realism. During this period, he visited George Costakis’s enormous collection of avant-garde art, and saw Giacomo Manzùs breakthrough exhibition in Moscow at the Russian Academy of Art. His world view was adventurous, amplified by the books and periodicals in the Stroganov’s library, and interactions with student peers and also provocative contemporaries, such as Vitaly Komar, Aleksandr Melamid, Boris Orlov, and Leonid Sokov.

While studying, he undertook commercial works to earn a living and support a young family. Like most Soviet artists, including famed cultural exiles like Ilya Kabakov, Frangulyan joined the Union of Artists of the USSR, which enabled his access to materials and opportunities. His career was established with the completion of Laurel Wreath (Novokuznetsk) in 1979 for which he was awarded the Grekov Silver Medal.

By 1983, Frangulyan had built a private foundry in the courtyard of his studio in central Moscow, near the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This enabled him to work on both public and private commissions, both in Soviet Russia and in Western Europe. As the extended era of Soviet Russia definitively closed, Frangulyan continued to work on monuments and smaller-scaled sculptures in marble, wood, sheet metal, and mixed media. His monuments are, by-and-large, memorials for cultural and intellectual leaders, for example, Mikhail Bulgakov, Joseph Brodsky, Albert Einstein, and Dmitry Shostakovich. His private practice built on conventional classicism and, even, the avant-garde and minimalism.

The combination of Frangulyan’s formal education, his appetite for classical and Western art, and a resolve for experimentation places him in a unique category of off-modern artists. Frangulyan’s art, to deploy the thoughts of the late Svetlana Boym, who coined the term off-modern, “is a detour into the unexplored potentials of the modern project. It recovers unforeseen pasts and ventures into the side alleys of modern history, at the margins of error of major philosophical, economic, and technological narratives of modernization and progress.” Frangulyan’s work challenges conventional Western notions and understandings of Soviet and Russian art of the 20th and 21st centuries.