Sans titre de la série "Sots Art"

By freely coloring them, Boris Mikhailov brings back to life vernacular, black and white photographs that he kept during the Soviet era. Once rendered subjective through the artist's choice of color, the photographs are grouped in a series titled Sots Art in reference to the art movement that emerged in the USSR in the 1970s in reaction to Pop Art.

The process of colorization by hand is certainly simple but it is not naive. The Ukrainian photographer actually parodies with a sort of disillusioned irony the simplistic, artificial tricks used by the Soviet propaganda to highlight and glorify mundane or dark events.

Held in the Pinault Collection, the photographs of the Sots Art series were presented in the group show À Triple tour. Collection Pinault (“triple locked”) at the Paris Conciergerie, in 2013.