Erik Bulatov

His father was a communist party official who died in World War II at Pskov, and his mother fled Poland at age 15 in support of the Russian Revolution.

In the 1960s Bulatov formed the Sretensky Boulevard Group with Ilya Kabakov, Edik Steinberg, Oleg Vassiliev, Vladimir Yankilevsky, and Viktor Pivovarov.

Named by a Czech historian for the block on which they lived, the group often met at Kabakov's to discuss and show their work as they were not permitted to do so in "official" settings.

Bulatov symbolizes the government through his use of language as a system of order and control, the foundation of written law and constraint which he then plasters on every tree and rock.

His emphasis on only the public and external aspects of life--the street, the land, the State television broadcast--reinforces the notion that one's thoughts and feelings are (still) one's own.