The Moscow Conceptualist, or Russian Conceptualist, art and literature movement started in the early 1970s in the Soviet Union with the work of Komar and Melamid, known as Sots art. This movement continued as a trend in Soviet nonconformist art through the 1980s. It aimed to challenge socialist ideas by using methods from Western conceptual art and art that reuses existing works. It was the opposite of Socialist Realism, the official art style of the Soviet government. Artists explored many forms of art, such as painting, sculpture, performance, and writing. Joseph Bakshtein explained, "The development of this nonconformist tradition was driven by the need for people outside the mainstream in the Soviet Union to stand against a powerful government. To protect their identity in this situation, they created a different set of values, including standards of beauty and art."

Overview

The key people in the movement included Ilya Kabakov, Irina Nakhova, Viktor Pivovarov, Eric Bulatov, Andrei Monastyrski, Komar and Melamid, poets Vsevolod Nekrasov (ru), Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Anna Alchuk, Timur Kibirov, artist and writer Vladimir Sorokin, and writers Viktor Yerofeyev and Julia Kissina.

Mikhail Epstein explains why conceptualism fits the culture and history of Russia and how it differs from Western Conceptualism:

In the West, conceptualism replaces "one thing for another" — a real object with its verbal description. In Russia, the object that should be replaced is simply not present.

Epstein quotes Ilya Kabakov:

This closeness, connection, and contact with nothingness or emptiness is the main feature of 'Russian conceptualism.' It is like something floating in the air, a self-sufficient thing, like a strange structure with no connections or roots. In this way, we can say that our own thinking, from the beginning, could be called 'conceptualism.'

Moscow Conceptualist artists had trouble showing their work in the late Soviet Union. At the Manezh exhibit in 1962, which included the work of many artists who influenced the Moscow Conceptualists, then-Party leader Nikita Khrushchev strongly criticized the art and artists he saw. In 1974, during the Bulldozer Exhibition, Soviet authorities used bulldozers to destroy the artwork of many Moscow Conceptualist artists in the field where the exhibition was held. The movement was mostly ignored outside the Soviet Union and remained limited to a small group of Moscow artists and their friends.