Erik Bulatov was born in Sverdlovsk in the Urals in 1933. He studied at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow from 1952-1958. Until 1989, he lived in Moscow and worked mainly as a book illustrator; in 1991 he briefly went to New York before he made Paris, where he has lived for the past 30 years, his new home. Bulatov and his close friend Ilya Kabakov both were members of a small but important group of Russian artists who found their own artistic forms of expression outside of Soviet state art regulations. He was part of a generation of artists that was on a quest to find new forms of expression beyond avant-garde and Socialist Realism. Early disillusioned by Soviet state regulations of the art scene during the Cold War, Bulatov developed his own non-conformist pictorial language. Although he continued to use iconography and insignia of Socialist Realism, he integrated them into pictorial compositions with an ironic notion. In doing so, he worked on several pictorial levels. Like transparencies, for example, he superimposed lettering, political symbols and figures, or silhouettes in a Communist red over land- and cityscapes. Bulatov is considered one of the leading representatives of Moscow Conceptualism and Sots Art, and in his work he transcends the ideological reality of the Soviet system to expose illusions and misrepresentations. "I try to use the language of Soviet reality, which is marked by political clichés and serves to represent ideology. Very personal things can be expressed in this official, impersonal idiom. I focus on a thing itself and not on my relationship to it. Thus, I free myself from it and become a channel for life. I begin to understand its hidden meaning and throw off the illusions that falsely represent the truth. The most important thing in art for me is that I can see and understand the things that I do not perceive in life. Basically, paintings are my idea of freedom. They offer a space beyond the social world. I think the worst thing Soviet propaganda has done - apart from the lies and nonsense - is to keep brainwashing us into believing that the social world we live in every day is the only reality." Reality becomes visible in landscape and sky, in "Land and Sky", as the title suggests, an almost romantic landscape, unfortunately, we can't see it in its entirety. The view is blocked by a red surface that dissolves into red silhouettes of the individual treetops. Only the view into the sky is unobstructed and promising. Bulatov's works are painted with great mastery, they carry a melancholic beauty and profound messages. Thus, it is not surprising that Bulatov is one of the Russian artists that fetch record prices on the international auction market. [SM]