The gallery organized a lecture and artist talk, by the painter and performance artist Vitaly Komar. In "My Experience as an Artist in Russia and in the West" Vitaly described himself as a man of duality. Born in the USSR in 1943 and living in the U.S. since 1978, Komar identifies as half Russian and half American. In fact, most of his artistic career has been as half of a duo, for from the 1960s through 2003, Vitaly Komar worked with artist Alex Melamid as the artistic duo Komar and Melamid. Together, they founded the Sots Art (Soviet Pop and Conceptual Art) movement in Russia, which co- opted the visual language of official Soviet state-sponsored art and propaganda.

After moving to the United States, Komar and Melamid became some of the world’s most famous post-modern artists. They are included in the 100 Best Artists of the XX Century (Editions Hazan, 1998) and participated in such major world art events as the Venice Biennial (several times), Documenta (Kassel), and Moscow and Sydney Biennials. Their paintings are in the permanent collections of such museums as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA - Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Jewish Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Victoria and Albert Museum, London, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Australian National Gallery, Canberra, The Canadian National Gallery, Museum Ludwig of Modern Art, Vienna, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, The National Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, and The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.