Kolodzei Art Foundation

Biography: Erik Bulatov (1933-2025), a prominent nonconformist artist, was born in Sverdlovsk, USSR, in 1933. He worked in Moscow and Paris, and he died in Paris. My mother, Tatiana Kolodzei, met Erik Bulatov in the late 1960s. I warmly remember many visits with my mother to the Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vassiliev studio in Moscow, and later our visits to his studio in Paris. In 1991, Erik Bulatov created the logo for the Kolodzei Art Foundation.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Erik Bulatov started developing a personal style, analyzing the interplay of contrasting symbolic systems, such as language and images or abstraction and figuration/reality. In his artworks, imagery and words are used to explore space and light. In turn, these spatial preoccupations describe social relations in the real world. Light is one of the important elements in Bulatov’s artworks.

The meaning of his work and the symbolic codes he uses are products of his cultural background. For Bulatov, space was always multi-layered, juxtaposing texts from slogans or recognizable symbols with images. One of his goals was to study the border between the artistic space and the social space. In *Entrance, 1973*, Bulatov incorporates and integrates figure, design, and text to map the relationship between word and image. The word "Entrance" and the bullet-like hole in the man’s face set against a red-gridded background invite the viewer to become a participant within the artwork.

In 2015, Bulatov was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. Bulatov’s works are in many public collections, including: The Pompidou, The State Hermitage Museum, The Tretyakov Gallery, The State Russian Museum, The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and the Zimmerli Art Museum.