Andrei Molodkin
Crude

Andrei Molodkin is a Russian artist who uses crude oil in his artworks to deconstruct the economic realities of geopolitical praxis. His exhibition CRUDE effectively articulates the space between people’s peaceful, democratic aspirations and the unending conflicts perpetuated by oil-politics. Molodkin's visual and conceptual strategies recall some of the basic principles of Constructivist Art, which upheld art as the domain of pure feeling and social harmony. His artworks also expand the practice of Minimal Art, an unembellished, formalist late 20th century American approach to factory art-making. Molodkin links crude oil to democracy, justice, liberty, and revolution as well as to icons such as the Statue of Liberty and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

In one of his constructions, Democracy, Molodkin analyzes the concept of democracy through the universal vernacular of oil. Empire at War, Molodkin’s portrait of an evangelistic George W. Bush, embodies the danger of theocracy.

First exhibited at the Station Museum of Houston, it was then moved to the American University Museum in Washington D.C.