The Russian artist Viktor Pivovarov has been living in Prague for the past sixteen years, and his work, like that of his colleague Ilya Kabakov, also one of the conceptual artists active in the “Alba” group in Moscow during the late ’60s and early ’70s, reflects the émigré’s bittersweet nostalgia for another place and time.

The most pronounced aspect of Pivovarov’s production is literary, and his idiom belongs to the history of Surrealism, an essentially literary mode. His writings, compiled in a six-volume catalogue which accompanied the exhibition, are as integral to his oeuvre as his objects,