Have You Eaten Caviar Lately?

26.04 — 24.05.2025
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Syntax Gallery is pleased to announce new exhibition by Alexander Kosolapov. The exhibition will take place in the NK Gallery in Antwerp (Pourbusstraat 19).

Alexander Kosolapov. Still Serving Irony

One of the original provocateurs of Sots Art—known for slicing through the façades of ideology with gleeful precision—Alexander Kosolapov is once again at exhibition with works that span decades but feel relevant with renewed urgency. This selection, presented by Syntax Gallery, underscores his continued interrogation of cultural mythologies, now reframed against a world reeling from overlapping crises.

Kosolapov (b. 1943) is often cast in two acts: his early years in Moscow and his long-established career in New York, where he relocated in 1975. But to divide his life so cleanly is to miss the constant crosscurrent of East and West that defines his practice. Kosolapov has long existed in the interstice—between ideologies, aesthetics, and cultural signifiers—turning familiar symbols into mechanisms of critique.

The exhibition, Have You Eaten Caviar Lately?, gathers a series of sharp, iconic works. It offers a prime example of Kosolapov’s flair for upending the semiotics of power and luxury. The title, framed as a casual query, evokes both Soviet austerity and capitalist indulgence. That tension ripples throughout the show. In Malevich (1991), Kosolapov echoes the radical abstraction of Suprematism only to flatten it into a commodity, screenprinted on paper like a relic of revolution repackaged for the gift shop.

Similarly, Lenin. Coca-Cola (1991) fuses Soviet sainthood with American consumerism—a signature Kosolapov maneuver. This piece draws a direct line back to his infamous Lenin Coca-Cola series, reiterating his belief that both systems—Communist and capitalist—rely on potent visual branding to maintain authority. In Kosolapov’s universe, neither Lenin nor Coke is sacred; both are reduced to the same level of surface appeal.

The twin canvases Red Caviar and Blue Caviar (1990–2022) stretch across decades, shimmering with garish color and coated irony. Painted and silkscreened in layers, they act as uneasy monuments to decadence, where the opulence of caviar is less a delicacy than a metaphor for empty spectacle. Juxtaposed side by side, their palette of red and blue reads like a binary no one escapes.