Alexander Kosolapov

Alexander Kosolapov is a world-renowned Russian painter and sculptor, who is currently active in the United

States. Kosolapov was born in Moscow, Russia, and attended the Secondary Art School of V. Surikov Art Insti-

tute in Moscow between 1950 and 1961. He went on to join the Stroganov Art and Design College in Moscow,

where he studied until 1968, with a break in between due to military service. Kosolapov is a dynamic artist, who

constantly shifts between different ideologies, cultures, languages, and even countries.

He spent 30 years in Moscow before immigrating in 1975 to New York, where he was introduced to American

Pop Art, especially the works of Andy Warhol. However, he still maintains his aesthetic connection with Sots-

Art, a movement he cofounded in 1973. One of his contemporary pieces is the Lenin Coca Cola, which is a clas-

sic example of his obsession with the aesthetics of American consumerism and Russian ideologies and art. As a

testimony to his dynamism, he recently started to experiment with new, nonexistent Post-Soviet Russian brands

to show that the world today is consumed by ideologies and consumerism.

Some of the galleries Kosolapov has exhibited in include Artists' House at Kuznetsky Most Str., Moscow, in 1974,

Semaphore Gallery, New York, in 1985, Galerie Karenina, Vienna, in 1997, and Galerie Anna Friebe, Cologne,

Germany, in 1987. He has also participated in group exhibitions like New Art from the Soviet Union at the Pratt

Institute Gallery in Columbia, Montgomery Hall at St. Mary College in Maryland in 1978, and Art=Money? at

The Gallery in New York City in 1990. Kosolapov's collections of works are found in many places, including

the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Chase Manhattan bank in New York, and the Wihlhelm-Hack-Museum in

Ludwigshafen, Germany. Religious groups have targeted his work several times, notably with the 2003 defacing

of This is My Blood by the "For the Moral Rebirth of the Fatherland" religious group. Nonetheless, he has re-

peatedly affirmed that he means the church no harm. The artist currently lives and works in New York City and

Moscow.

©ArtNet

McLenin Next Block, 1991