The Missing (the Last March) Naum Medovoy

Oksana Salamatina, founder of Salamatina Gallery, said, “I am happy to have had the opportunity to work closely with Fallani Venezia – Center for the Arts and Skira to bring to the public this important publication by artist Naum Medovoy, his first devoted exclusively to his project Last March.”  

The Missing (The Last March) was broadcast by Thirteen/WNET New York, the flagship PBS station, in 1985 as part of its acclaimed local series about World War II: Years of Darkness.  The film speaks with a rare poignancy about millions of Russian soldiers who fell into the category of "missing."  When Russian soldiers were captured by Germans in World War II, they suffered in Nazi concentration camps; a great number of them died.  Those who survived were repatriated to Russia. Since Stalin considered them traitors they were sent to Gulags in Siberia, where most perished.  The families of these soldiers were told that their loved ones were simply missing. 

Thirty years after this broadcast, Medovoy has revisited and drawn inspiration from this documentary, making large drawings using images from the film as his starting point.  He has also created a video installation in collaboration with Trevor Tweteen, a New York-based artist and cinematographer—noted for his strong imagery and lyrical visual style—who represented Ireland at the 55th Venice Biennale, as part of a collaborative project with Richard Mosse. Medovoy’s Last March will premier at the 2017 Venice Biennale as part of a parallel program.

Naum Medovoy’s career spans four decades. A self-taught artist, he was mostly a documentary filmmaker until he began printing stills from his films, applying oil sticks and black and white ink to their surfaces. The resulting works serve as platforms for expressive and perceptual experimentation, which are often self-referential in nature; Medovoy’s photo-documentary collage paintings are rooted in his childhood memories and previous work. It is this strange appeal of Medovoy’s work—which straddles the line between beauty and grotesqueness—that gives it its lasting influence and afterlife, that “grips” our throat; or, as George Stevens once declared in talking about film, that bounces off the page and into the viewer’s mind, like something alive and changing. The same thing can be said about Medovoy’s art; it lasts with you long after you’ve left it.