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.

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