Dimitri Kozyrev

Dimitri Kozyrev's (Russian, b. 1967) various bodies of work can be described as an attempt to understand and manage change. To capture it. Hold or compress change into a single visual moment so it can be remembered.

“I maintain that just as the concept of the military avant-garde has been ‘lost’, because of changes in methods of warfare,” Dimitri Kozyrev says, “the avant-garde in the contemporary art world has also lost its edge.” Kozyrev was born in the U.S.S.R., where the history and mental impact of war was as ingrained in his surroundings as it is dominant today in his subject matter. In St. Petersburg, Kozyrev lived in the wake of the totalitarian regime of Joseph Stalin; he was no stranger to landscapes destroyed by the military and likewise, the censorship of the avant-garde movements. Today, Kozyrev paints these landscapes, rearranging the pictorial space in a reference to modernist movements like Constructivism (censored by totalitarian regimes) and portraying the landscape’s ability to heal its own wounds.

Dimitri Kozyrev was born in 1967 in Leningrad, USSR. He moved to United States in 1991. Kozyrev received his MFA from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000 and his BFA from Ohio University in 1997. Since then Kozyrev has had multiple solo shows at Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, Mark Moore Gallery, Culver City, CA, Benrimon Contemporary, NY, NY, David Richard, Santa Fe, NM, Golf Coast Museum of Art, FL and Breese Little, London, UK. He has also been in a number of group shows at museums and galleries in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Tucson, Houston, Amsterdam, London, Krasnoyarsk (Russia). Reviews of his work have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, Artweek, Artforum, Huffington Post, Art Itd., Artinfo, Wall Street International and many on line publications. For the past ten years he was a Professor of Art at The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. He lives and works in Austin, TX.