FRANKFURT—Four years ago, Frankfurt?s Schirn Kunsthalle scored a huge success with “Dream Factory Communism,” which demonstrated how the Socialist Realist artists of Stalin?s day were forced to advance Soviet mythology of a proletarian paradise by painting all-too obvious scenes of worshipful workers. By contrast, many of the Moscow Conceptualist pieces in the museum’s follow-up, “Total Enlightenment,” June 21 through September 14, are anything but accessible. The exhibition aims to provide an overview of the often coded, politically critical art that flourished at society’s margins in late Soviet and early post- Soviet Russia. The installations and paintings—by internationally known figures such as Komar & Melamid and Erik Bulatov, as well as by less-famous artists, like Andrei Monastyrski and Pavel Pepperstein?illuminate stark contrasts between the Conceptualist work created in the West during the 1960s and ’70s and that executed in Moscow.

"Beneath the Surface" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.