Dmitry Prigov

Yevgeny Barabanov, "Image and Text: Russian Art of the Post-Avant-Garde," in Adaptation and Negation of Socialist Realism: Contemporary Soviet Art, Ridgefield, Conn.: Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990, pp. 34-35
Dmitrij Prigow: Arbeiten, 1975-1995, Cologne: Germany: Krings-Ernst Galerie, 1996
Natalia Tamruchi. "Moskovskii kontseptualizm: Istoriia slov," Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia, 4/93, pp. 206-223
For a similar work, Sky and Sea, 1982, ink and acrylic on paper, 40 x 54 ½ cm, see Forbidden Art: The Postwar Russian Avant-Garde, New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1998, p. 45

Dmitry Prigov, a key figure in the Almanakh group of poet-performers, was known as both a poet and a graphic artist. He initially studied sculpture at the Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts (formerly the Stroganov School) in Moscow, and since 1970 has produced numerous poems, works on paper, and installations. His poetry collections developing conceptualist ideas were published in samizdat (self-published books). In his works--many of which make use of the methods of visual and concrete poetry--Prigov explored the verbal and visual properties of written language, in the process releasing the latter from its traditional role as mere verbal description. Prigov has pointed out that he was never a dissident artist, and that he was concerned only with the aesthetic and cultural aspects of art.