Vitaly Komar, “Allegories of Justice”

During the 1980s Vitaly Komar and his partner Alexander Melamid lampooned Soviet Social Realism as dissident artists who had fled Moscow for the West. Today, the U.S.S.R is dead and Komar has struck out on his own, but his latest paintings, focusing on Putin's Russia, suggest that not all that much has changed since the Cold War's end. Recurring allegorical motifs—bears, the scales of justice—evoke a society throwing away democracy for the false comforts of nationalism.