While living in the Soviet Union, Ernst Neizvestny did not consider himself a dissident. He saw the harassment and insults from the political leadership as “local excesses” and a manifestation of the “uncultured” nomenklatura. But Neizvestny had had enough of the totalitarian system. And he knew the price of freedom in every sense. And that, in fact, was why he left.

A new way of filling in the backgrounds and techniques for the embedding of objects in assemblages and abstractions was shown to his friend from Leningrad, Yevgeny Rukhin, by Vladimir Nemukhin in the 1960s. A geologist by training, Rukhin became one of the most brilliant artists of unofficial art. And one of the most daring. Rukhin's intransigence and courage, his open confrontation with the authorities gave rise to the version of his murder for political reasons.

Conceptualism with a suprematist face. Igor Makarevich is one of the main figures of Moscow romantic conceptualism. He is a member of the famous art group “Collective Actions”, which was founded by Andrey Monastyrsky in 1976. Igor Makarevich has a special history of relations with Malevich and his philosophy of Suprematism. The conceptualist Makarevich explores the suprematist field in search of the “elixir of painting” — the magical component which animates pictorial matter.