Lot 297: Yuri Dyshlenko , Russian 1936-1995 Romance from the series SPIRITUS LOCI , 1980-1990 acrylic on canvas

inscribed N21 , #21 (36) , Yuri Dyshlenko and dated 1990 (on the reverse) acrylic on canvas

measurements 43 3/4 by 34 in. alternate measurements 111 by 86.5 cm

Janet Kennedy, ed., Yurii Dyshlenko: Modernity, Abstraction and Mass Media, St. Petersburg: Palace Editions and the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, 2002, p. 69, illustrated

Gregory Gallery, New York (acquired directly from the artist's estate)

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, NEW YORK
An important member of the Leningrad nonconformist art movement, Yuri Dyshlenko participated in the first unofficial art exhibition in Leningrad, held at the Gaz Palace of Culture in December 1974. However, he regarded the Moscow-based Conceptualists, a group of artists that conducted an ongoing critique of representational painting, as his closest contemporaries.

Dyshlenko received his formal art training at the Leningrad Institute of Theater, Music, and Cinematography with the eminent stage designer and theater director Nikolai Akimov. He graduated from the Institute in 1962 and worked as an illustrator before turning to painting in the early 1970s. The language and methods of advertising, the technology of reproduction--all this became a field for creative transformation and irony in Dyshlenko's works. To create his paintings, the artist employed motifs derived from advertising and other forms of popular culture, often including reproductions of slogans, product labels, and cartoons. From 1989, he lived and worked in New York.

It was in New York that Dyshlenko completed Spiritus Loci, a series that he had begun in Leningrad years earlier. As its title suggests, the series deals with matters of local interest: Spiritus Loci is rich in allusions to the history of St. Petersburg. The series' subtitle, 36 Views through the Window to Europe and Back, alludes to a cycle of woodcuts by the Japanese printmaker Hokusai (1760-1849). It also makes reference to the frequent description of St. Petersburg as Russia's "Window to the West." The scholar Janet Kennedy has described the series as follows: "Spiritus Loci is full of unstable illusions. These result in a visual embodiment of an established trope: St. Petersburg is a city founded on illusion, the acme of artificiality, a city whose grand facades conceal the often makeshift nature of daily life."