Dmitry Gutov
Thaw, 2006

Artist
Dmitry Gutov

Title
Thaw

Year of creation
2006

Technique and duration
Video: Thaw, 3.40 minutes / Music: Dmitri Shostakovich, Op.121 (1965) / Vocals: F. Kuznecov / Piano: Y. Serov

Year of acquisition
2009

Acquisition of the foundation

The title Thaw (Snow Melt) of the video work refers to a painting of the same name by the Russian landscape painter Fedor Vasiliev, 1871, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Shot in slow motion, the film shows an aging man, the artist himself, slipping on melting snow and mud on a rural path in the thaw. He loses his glasses in the mud, finds them again, cleans them and tries in vain to get back on his feet in the slush. Thaw refers to the post-Stalinist so-called “thaw period” under Khrushchev. The composition by Dmitri Shostakovich, a setting to music of a lapidary letter to the editor that was published in the legendary satirical magazine Krokodil, also refers to this time.

The work of the artist and theorist Dmitri Gutov specifically takes up aesthetic concepts of Marxism, such as that of Mikhail Lifschitz, and finds its points of reference to the present in the tradition of Soviet art of the 1920-1930s and 1960s. Gutov's realistic historicism is a living experience of the past as actuality. He firmly represents the position of the socially committed artist with a distinctly critical position on the present. His diverse work includes painting, installation, photography and video as well as outdoor work.