Grisha Bruskin, the painter who filed Soviet emblems like a dictionary

Grisha Bruskin

Photo: Rodrigo Fernández / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 21, 1945 Moscow
Occupation	Painter
Awards	Kandinsky Prize, Project of the Year · Fiddler on the Roof Award, Legendary Person

Grisha Bruskin’s best-known paintings look at first like a storeroom of plaster statues: rows of pale, anonymous figures, each one blank until you notice the single object it carries in colour, the attribute that tells you which Soviet type it is meant to be. In Fundamental Lexicon he took the official imagery of the state and filed it like entries in a dictionary, so emblems that once demanded belief could be read, compared and quietly doubted. That canvas set a record for contemporary Russian art in one evening and sent him abroad within a week. He has spent the decades since arguing that the price was the least interesting thing about it.

He has also refused every label that came with the record. Critics filed him with Sots Art, the movement that parodied Soviet propaganda, and he has never accepted it, any more than he accepted membership of the Moscow Conceptualists. He belonged to no group, he says, and borrows a line from the old professor in Luchino Visconti’s Conversation Piece: “Crows fly in flocks, eagles fly alone.” His own summary is blunter: “I look where others don’t look, and I see what others don’t see.”

Grigory Davidovich Bruskin was born in Moscow on 21 October 1945 and grew up in the Basmanny district, the youngest of five children. His four older sisters staged puppet shows for him as their only spectator, using dolls their father had brought back from Germany after the war; he still calls them his first theatre. His parents were atheists and internationalists who rejected nationalism of every kind, including the Jewish kind,. He studied in the art department of the Moscow Textile Institute from 1963 to 1968 and joined the Union of Artists of the USSR in 1969. The Manezh exhibition of 1962 shook him as a schoolboy, and so did the paintings of Mikhail Roginsky. To earn a living he coached applicants for the Stroganov, Textile and Polygraphic institutes in drawing and painting.

His solo shows in the Soviet years were few and often shut down. The work he made in that period set up the structure he still uses: the world as one enormous book. The Alefbet series, named after the Hebrew word for alphabet, treats Jewish symbols and figures as letters in a text without end. “I always wanted to paint a picture as a text, and a text as a picture,” he has written. Fundamental Lexicon, completed in 1986, applied the same grammar to Soviet mythology. The film director Miloš Forman bought its first part at a Moscow exhibition in February 1987.

The second part went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in Moscow in July 1988, the only sale an international auction house ever held in the Soviet Union. It fetched £242,000, far above its estimate, and went to a German collector who had flown in to buy it; Bruskin has said the underbidder was Elton John. About a week later he left for New York on a cultural exchange and soon found his face on the front page of The New York Times.

In America the paintings grew sparer. Crowded compositions gave way to single figures in flat local colour in the Metamorphoses series, and he began to translate his characters into tapestry, porcelain and bronze. In 1999, at the invitation of the German government and as Russia’s representative, he made Life Above All for the rebuilt Reichstag in Berlin: a triptych of 115 small images hung like an iconostasis, its title a deliberate echo of “Deutschland über alles.” Two years later he published Past Imperfect, a memoir he began, he says, to tell what had really happened at the auction, and which kept growing backwards into childhood. An English edition followed in 2008.

The large installations came next. H-Hour, a crowd of white-painted bronze figures shown at the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, won him the Kandinsky Prize for Project of the Year in 2012. An Archaeologist’s Collection presented Soviet statues as excavated fragments of a vanished civilisation, installed in the former church of Santa Caterina during the 2015 Venice Biennale. Two years later he filled the Russian Pavilion in Venice with Change of Scenery, whose video shows the shadows of tin soldiers fighting a swarm of drones diving out of a dark sky.

The record that made his name also made him a suspect. After the sale, he says, many friends from his old circle pretended not to know him, and rumours spread that he was a bad painter who had fooled the West. “It was ordinary envy,” is his verdict. The suspicion has since come from opposite directions. In March 2022 the New Tretyakov Gallery opened Change of Scenery and closed it on 19 April, months ahead of schedule, citing “technical faults” in the multimedia installation; the art magazine Artguide reported that the order came from the Ministry of Culture after complaints, which was never confirmed. Four years on, his new Moscow show drew the reverse charge: the academic Sergei Medvedev accused him of lending respectability to the authorities by exhibiting there, while the columnist Dmitry Gubin replied in The Moscow Times that Bruskin lives in America and that Russians who stayed need precisely this kind of art. Neither camp fits an artist who has always preferred allegory to statement.

That new show is Dies Illa/That Day, a vast installation built for the Collection ZILART museum in Moscow, which opened in December 2025 and closes a trilogy begun with Change of Scenery and continued with The Great Tomorrow. For the first time he works in felt, with figures that he says came to him in a dream, frozen in stage sets that come alive in black-and-white video animations. He calls it his theatre of memory, after Giulio Camillo’s Renaissance memory theatre. The drone video from Venice is part of it, and visitors ask whether he really made it a decade ago. “I’m interested in the parable,” he answers. “And a parable has a way of becoming topical again from time to time.”

The market keeps returning to him regardless. In October 2026 his Logie, a 1986 painting from the collection of the Swiss journalist Eric A. Peschler, was the top lot of a Bonhams sale of Soviet nonconformist art at €254,400, more than three times its estimate. Bruskin, who long ago left his New York dealer Marlborough and no longer works with any gallery, lives and works between New York and Moscow, and remains unmoved: “Auctions seem to me the least interesting part of the art world, because they are not about art but about money.” The trilogy is finished. The book he started in Moscow was always meant to stay open.

Tags: art, artists, Sotheby's, painters, Grisha Bruskin, Soviet nonconformist art, Venice Biennale

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