Moscow’s Modern Art Museum has opened a display of art replete with absurdity and black humor. In the first ever retrospective show of necrorealism, its proponents explore ideology through death.

The movement has its roots in the St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) of the early 1980s. It emerged from the fertile soil of doubt and disappointment in the Soviet totalitarian regime. The USSR was facing its nemesis and the artistic community merely responded to what was in the air.

“This movement altered the main values of the Soviet era by turning the concept of death in the name of the Fatherland into a senseless thing,” the curator of the exhibition, Olesya Turkina, told Ria Novosti news agency.

Evgeny Yufit, 1991(Image from MMOMA.ru)

­The movement’s founding father was the artist and independent filmmaker Evgeny Yufit. In the 1980s, along with a group of associates, he produced a series of photographs of men in ‘zombie make-up’ acting out fights and chases against a backdrop of woods, abandoned construction sites and other somber  terrains.

In the 1990s, necrorealism reached the West, featuring in the Perestroyka and Sots art displays in cities including Amsterdam, Dusseldorf, Jerusalem and Hanover.

Moscow’s large-scale exhibition occupies four floors of the Museum’s building in Ermolayevsky Lane, showcasing dozens of paintings, short films and installations, united in their core message. These artworks reveal the uniqueness of the necrorealism movement that has no analogues in contemporary art elsewhere in the world and confronts us with its many faces, both old and new.

The exhibition will run until October 30.