Vadim Sidur - Biography

Biography

Sidur was born into a Jewish family in Yekaterinoslav (currently Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine). In 1942 he was drafted into the Red Army and fought in the battles of World War II near his hometown. After being wounded in the jaw by a bullet, he was discharged as a disabled veteran. Sidur abandoned his plans to study medicine and entered Stroganov Moscow State University of Arts and Industry in Moscow instead, where his teachers were G.I. Motovilov and S.L. Rabinovich. In 1957 he became a member of the Union of Artists of USSR.

During the early period, he created realistic ceramic sculpture. There were also such works as Heads of the Blinds, Portrait of Ernst Neizvestny cut out of rock In 1950s Sidur's art deviated from the official cannon, and he completely abandoned it in 1959, developing his own art language.

In the 1960s he produced the sculpture series of Monuments (Монументы), almost all of which are now indeed public monuments in the squares of Russia and the West. In that work and the related series Disabled (Инвалиды), he tried to condense artistic form to a symbol, a sign, or a formula.

Later he worked on his own philosophy centered around the artist, prophet of future global catastrophes. An incarnation of this idea in art became his style of Grob-Art, that Sidur saw as a new direction in art. In 1974 he worked on the book Monuments to the Current State (Памятники Современному Состоянию) that he self-described as a myth. He also shot an underground movie based on the book. He worked on sculpture series Man and Woman, Motherhood. In the 1980s, shortly before his death, he wrote a book of poetry titled The Most Happy Autumn (Самая Счастливая Осень).

Since the 1960s Sidur's works became known in the West. Soon he became famous. In the Soviet Union his works were not exhibited from 1950 until his death, with the exception of the one-day exhibition in the House of Writers in Moscow in 1968. After Sidur's death and with the onset of perestroika, there was established Vadim Sidur's Museum (since 1995 named Moscow State Vadim Sidur's Museum) and the artistic legacy of Sidur was recognized as the national treasure.