Perov

Since the late 1980s, Vladimir Kozin has been developing his personal artistic language, creating assemblages from found objects. From 1996 to 2001, he was a member of the New Blockheads Cooperative, which largely defined the strategy of the artist’s practice, wherein the postmodernist appropriation and citation of classical works can be considered a characteristic method.

Kozin has a particular interest in the artist’s book as a medium. Perov is a reworked and conceptually reinterpreted album of reproductions of the paintings by the nineteenth‑century artist Vasily Perov (1956 edition) from Tosno District Library. The artist rebound the album and placed it in a box‑folder made from the original cover. Using transparent tape, he fixed various tiny objects—such as matches, pill blisters, seeds, pepper packets, dried plants, buttons, and so on—to the reproductions. Ignoring the paintings’ subjects, Kozin focused on their composition, turning classical images into multilayered assemblages with an ironic and at times provocatively vandalistic tone.