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BUNKER GROUP
(Written by Piter Frank)
Back in the USSR,
artistic dissidents did not all congregate in Moscow and
Leningrad. Indeed, some of the most fervent cultural resistance
took place in the outlying, non-Russian republics. A whole group
of painterly experimentalists, for instance, coalesced in
Yerevan, constituting Armenia's unofficial avant garde; as
late-Soviet repression gave way to perestroika, the group
emerged from its basements, taking the moniker
"Bunker" in recollection of its once-underground
status (and still-combative nature).
In the
decade-plus since its formation, the Bunker group has seen many
of its members wander off to Paris, New York, and Los Angeles,
but it continues to exist as a network of artists still united
by their commitment to an aesthetic of funky immediacy. Four of
the most active Bunkerites show some of their current work with
some of their "classic-era" stuff, demonstrating an
unbroken continuity in their thinking, but distinct evolution in
their practice(s).
Achot-Achot's
pattern painting has moved from obsessive dotting to dancing
spots and cleverly mirrored shapes, while Sev's
painting-assemblages have gotten more and more gnarled and
furious-looking. Kiki has refined his abstract expressionism
into stylized forms, expansive and jovial, while Armen Hadjian
(the only Bunkerite here not graced with a mono- or pseudonym)
has tightened and loosened his clumps and fans of gestural
brushstrokes, sometimes smoothing them into monochromatic
fields. Someone somewhere has done all of this before; no one
anywhere has done any of it the way these rambunctiously diehard
late Modernists continue to do it.
Bunker Group at
The Loft, 2525 Michigan Ave. #D4, S. Monica
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