USA's Most Wanted Komar and Melamind

The two Russia emigrants Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid created a series of paintings that exhibit a notoriously Russian sense of wry humor and irony. The Most Wanted paintings reflect Komar and Melamid’s interpretation of a professional market research survey about preferences in painting. Born and raised in the former Soviet Union, the artists were educated in a place where government was intended to be designed in the interests of the people.
Through their work, Komar and Melamid strike at the deepest roots of Western cultural tradition. Melamid once described the concept for the project in the following manner:

In a way it was a traditional idea, because a faith in numbers is fundamental to people…Numbers are innocent. It’s absolutely try data. It doesn’t say anything about personalities, but it says something more about ideals, and about how this world functions. That’s really the truth, as much as we can get to the truth. Truth is a number (Govan).

By painting exactly what America wants to see, Komar and Melamid create a simple blue landscape with a lake, George Washington, a few young children, and playing looking deer. This perception of nature has left nature entirely in the dust by the Most Wanted series. The main connection with nature that can be found is that Americans chose nature as their desired setting for the simple painting. Once again, the society in which the work of art was created dictates the presentation of nature.