Dimitri Kozyrev Russian, b. 1967
Works
Biography
Lost Landscape #6, 2018
“I maintain that just as the concept of the military avant-garde has been ‘lost’, because of changes in methods of warfare,” Dimitri Kozyrev says, “the avant-garde in the contemporary art world has also lost its edge.” Kozyrev was born in the U.S.S.R., where the history and mental impact of war was as ingrained in his surroundings as it is dominant today in his subject matter. In St. Petersburg, Kozyrev lived in the wake of the totalitarian regime of Joseph Stalin; he was no stranger to landscapes destroyed by the military and likewise, the censorship of the avant-garde movements. Today, Kozyrev paints these landscapes, rearranging the pictorial space in a reference to modernist movements like Constructivism (censored by totalitarian regimes) and portraying the landscape’s ability to heal its own wounds (via Artsy).