Alexander Kosolapov

Alexander Kosolapov (Russian: Александр Семёнович Косолапов; born January 1, 1943) is a world-renowned Russian-American sculptor and painter. 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. Kosolapov chooses subjects in the social context (socialist realism, western pop culture, systems of power) as the main object of his irony. His ideas were formed in conditions of binary geopolitics. The main topic of his art is the ironic deconstruction of the ideology of a mass society. Using the principle of combining opposites, Kosolapov achieves unprecedented severity: he unitespolitical symbols, consumerists icons and different ideological contexts in his works. Kosolapov's artworks, associated with the use of religious symbols, became the subject of attacks on the artist. A Moscow court found these symbols to beextremist in 2010. Alexander Kosolapov participated in numerous art exhibitions in several European countries and in the United States. His works are represented in leading museums such as MoMA, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York and Centre Pompidou, Paris, as well as in many private collections.