ALEXANDER SEMENOVICH KOSOLAPOV (Russian: Born Moscow, 1943)

In 1968, Kosolapov graduated from the Stroganov Institute of Applied Arts as a monumental sculptor, but like many of his nonconformist contemporaries, he suffered from lack of commissions. In the early 1970s, he began to work in mixed media, producing pieces based on a fusion of logically incompatible elements. The wit and irony of these works sprang from two sources: Russian absurdist poetry of the 1920s and the poetics of Dada. Kosolapov believed that it was necessary to free objects from their traditional associations. He was interested in joining unfamiliar elements in his art to evoke improbable reactions, leading viewers to consider symbolic context instead of literal content. Like many of the Sots artists, Kosolapov satirized Soviet ideological mass production. But the originality of his early art lies in his obsession with everyday objects, exemplary of Soviet kitsch and often found by chance. In the mocking postmodernist style of works Kosolapov has created since his 1975 emigration to New York, he has parodied and juxtaposed American Pop Art and Socialist Realist banalities using representations of Lenin and Stalin as well as slogans and images of heroes of American "consumer idealism." From 1972 to 1984, Kosolapov worked as editor and director of the émigré artists' journal A-Ya. He participated in 20 years of Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union at the Museum Bochum in 1979, in solo exhibitions in galleries in Germany and New York, and in numerous group shows in Russia, Europe and the United States. He works and lives in New York City.