The show’s key sculptural work is Hero, Leader, God (2014), a bronze and enamel totem that distills Kosolapov’s enduring skepticism into three chilling words. In this unusual trinity of Lenin, Mickey Mouse, and Christ holding hands, power is mythologized, aestheticized, and ultimately hollowed out. The smooth sheen of the enamel-coated bronze recalls monuments past, while the title and the garrish red color cuts deeper—suggesting that our worship of authority remains intact.
Then there’s Coca-Cola (1990), painted just before the Soviet Union collapsed. Stretching nearly two meters across, the work drips with Americana, rendered in a deadpan style of a Coke advertisement that recalls but never quite mirrors Pop Art. Kosolapov has often been linked to Warhol, yet where Warhol saw iconography as an inevitability, Kosolapov sees it as a problem. “There is no escape,” Warhol once implied. Kosolapov disagrees—offering instead an exit route through irony.
Indeed, his irony is never purely decorative. It’s demanding. Kosolapov assumes a viewer who will recognize Malevich and Lenin, who will decode the semiotics of soda cans and luxury foodstuffs. Like Umberto Eco’s “model reader,” Kosolapov’s audience is meant to engage, to pull back the curtain on what these images are really saying. He gives us the symbols to help us, economically and coherently.
In the end, the work does not just expose systems—it entangles us in them. Kosolapov’s art insists that the ideological isn’t elsewhere; it’s here, in the slogans we forget to question, in the products we consume without thought. Whether rendered in bronze, canvas, or silkscreen, the message is the same: these symbols aren’t just remnants of history—they are living scripts we keep reciting.
Christianna Bonin