Looking at works from an unfamiliar world, we need the world as much as the work to understand what we are seeing. When Aleksandr Deineka’s grand-scale painting Textile Workers (1927) was exhibited in the Royal Academy in London in 2017, a critic described it as futuristic, likening the female factory workers to sci-fi robots. Criticizing the acute anachronism of this interpretation in the preface of her book on Deineka, art historian Christina Kiaer acknowledged the difficulty in reading Soviet paintings today: “To our eyes, unfamiliar with images of labor, these working women are strange harbingers of an unknown future imagined from the outmoded pasts of both Communism and modernist painting.” Placing Deineka’s paintings within their original sociopolitical context, Kiaer’s aim was to restore their legibility beyond the “prevailing visual codes of capitalism” and reveal something often lost on contemporary eyes. A similar reconstructive logic underpins the first retrospective of Soviet textile artist Anna Andreeva, curated by Kiaer at the Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki. Lauded in the USSR, including with the prestigious Repin Prize for lifetime achievement in 1972, Andreeva was virtually unknown in the West until in 2018, ten years after her death, the Museum of Modern …