When Elephants Paint

Komar and Melamid, The Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project

22 June - 19 August 2001

An initiative by New York-based Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, When Elephants Paint presented paintings by elephants from The Asian Elephant Art & Conservation Project (AEACP).

The AEACP was established by conceptual artists Komar & Melamid in 1997 as a means of raising awareness of the plight of Asian elephants whose numbers were steadily declining in countries such as Thailand, India and Indonesia, where destruction and deforestation of their natural habitat, civil unrest, and a ban on teak logging had put many of the elephants and their trainers (mahouts) out of work and in a perilous situation.

Komar & Melamid believe that by teaching the elephants, in collaboration with their mahouts, to hold brushes and, using non-toxic paint, to paint on paper and canvas they can promote and distribute the elephants’ colourful abstract works and raise much needed funds for the elephants at the same time.

The MCA exhibition presented a selection of paintings on paper by elephant artists from Thailand, India and Bali. Mia Fineman, art historian at Yale University and author of When Elephants Paint: The quest of two Russian artists to save the elephants of Thailand describes the elephants’ works as bearing an “uncanny resemblance to the messy, all-over, expansively gestural work of American artists of the late 1950s, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline”. The works on display, including one of Komar and Melamid’s earliest collaborative works with an elephant, were available for sale in an on-line auction accessible through the MCA website.

Also presented in the exhibition is another of Komar & Melamid’s animal projects, Moscow Through the Eyes of Mikki. These Polaroid photographs of Moscow’s Red Square were taken by a seven-year old Russian chimpanzee Mikki, who was taught to use various cameras by Komar & Melamid during the summer of 1998.

In 1998 Komar and Melamid presented their first lecture on elephant art at the Getty Institute in Los Angeles, and in June 1999 were invited to present a collection of work by elephant artists Juthanam, Phitsamai and Nam Chok at the Russian Pavilion of the prestigious Venice Biennale. Last year Christie’s Auction House in New York launched a series of fund-raising events for the project with a silent auction of elephant art raising US$75,000 for the project.

When Elephants Paint was sponsored by Animal Planet, a joint venture between Discovery Networks and the BBC. Animal Planet is the world's first and only TV channel devoted entirely to people and animals. The channel features high quality programming from world-renowned producers.

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