Boris Orlov

a Russian Postwar & Contemporary artist (b.1941).

Numerous key galleries and museums such as New Tretyakov Gallery have featured Boris Orlov's work in the past. Boris Orlov's work has been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices ranging from 10 USD to 100,000 USD, depending on the size and medium of the artwork.

Orlov prefers working in the Soviet “big style,” the formal side of Soviet reality, and absurdizing it. Thus in “Formal Portrait,” the bust of a hero is turned into the depiction of a chest covered in rows of military ribbons. But Orlov does not stop with irony in regard to the imperial language, he also reveals its eroticism, which the regime uses to manipulate the desires of the people. His work evolved toward more complex iconography and larger scale in the 1990s-2000s. His “house style” in the 2000s was “Khokhloma painting” on top of enlarged old photographs. At the same time, he also creates gigantic installations of objects that mock the myths of Russian culture, rather than Soviet symbols. Thus, the artist parodies not so much the language of imperial power but the very style of Sots Art in which he worked in the Soviet years.

Boris Orlov has been featured in articles for The Guardian, Associated Press and Moscow Times. The most recent article is NotForever: Capturing the Collective Soul of the Stagnation Era written for RUSSIAN ART + CULTURE in August 2020.

https://borisorlov.ru