A peculiar, extremely interesting "war of images", while humor emerges as an ideological, ultimately timeless means and a pressure valve within a rigid system, are reflected in the new, artistic proposal of MOMUS-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection, at the Moni Lazariston, in Thessaloniki, in the exhibition entitled "Caricaturing Modernism: Soviet Cartoons on Art from the collection of Yuri Albert", from 20 June, 2026 to 10 January, 2027.

Through a rare set of 24 caricatures these caricatures, created between 1930 and 1970 and published in the magazine Crocodile and other publications, the exhibition visitor discovers -among other things- the multi-layered, everyday life in Soviet society and within it, the relationships between artists and authority, artists and the public, the intrigues of exhibition committees, the privileges and fears of creators, the ideological "battle" of socialist realism against the "decadent" art of the West.

The collection was assembled by the conceptual artist Yuri Albert, who became fascinated by these images because of their peculiar relationship to reality. As Albert himself has observed, the cartoonists often mocked artworks they had never actually seen, while audiences formed their understanding of modernism through these distorted representations. In this way, satire produced a largely “imaginary” version of modern art.

The exhibition enters into dialogue with works on show at MOMUS-Museum of Modern Art from the Costakis Collection by artists of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde, creating a confrontation between the original artworks and their satirical representations. The coexistence of these two bodies of work reveals not only a clash of aesthetic values but also the mechanisms through which ideology shapes the reception of art.

Curated by: Maria Tsantsanoglou, Artistic Director of MOMUS-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection Catalogue Essays: Sandra Frimmel, Yuri Albert