Grisha Bruskin

born 1945 in Moscow, lives in New York.

In his triptych “Life Above All”, located in the parliamentary club room of the Reichstag Building, Russian artist Grisha Bruskin ironically comments on ideological myths, in particular those promulgated by the ‘sculpture mania’ that prevailed in the Soviet Union and attempted to use art for the purposes of indoctrination. Arranged like a wall of icons in a Russian Orthodox church, 115 individual pictures hang above – monochrome white outlines identifiable as individual types only through the coloured attributes each figure holds: an agricultural worker from a kolkhoz with enormous grapes she has harvested, a Soviet soldier with the coats of arms of the Federal Republic and the GDR, or a teacher holding up Leninist slogans for her class to read.