BORIS ORLOV | GENERAL

Boris Orlov graduated from the Stroganov Moscow State Academy of Arts and Industry, where he trained as a sculptor under the famous Soviet monumentalist and creator of the Moscow metro bas-reliefs, Georgy Motovilov. Closely associated with the Moscow-based Sots-art movement, Boris Orlov has described himself as an ‘imperial artist’. Seeing parallels in the imagery of Soviet Imperialism with the imagery of ancient Greece, Rome and the Baroque of St Petersburg, Orlov masterfully interweaves these but his work is always shot through with irony, thus undermining the notion of Soviet power.

'The subject of Soviet state power was forbidden to critique: by portraying its top echelon I crossed out my official career as an artist forever', the artist recalled in an interview. However, unlike most of the Sots-artists, he did not emigrate and lives in Moscow to this day. In 2008 Orlov was one of the finalists for the Kandinsky Prize.