Red on Red 

Timur Akhriev painted this portrait titled 'Red on Red', using oil on canvas. The intensity of the monochrome makes us consider how the artist uses visual codes to create meaning. Akhriev was born in 1983, in the former Soviet Union. The cultural memory of communism, and its collapse, would have been felt strongly by the artist. We might consider the colour red, a symbol of communism, and how this portrait relates to that history. Is this a self-consciously political statement? Or is it, perhaps, a more ambivalent reflection on a lost world? To understand it better, we might research Soviet attitudes to art, or read accounts of life after the Soviet Union. Understanding the social and institutional context helps us to interpret what might be at stake in this artwork.