Gosha Ostretsov

Georgy (Gosha) Ostretsov is a famous Russian artist and one of the brightest representatives of the Moscow avant-garde artistic life of the eighties. He practically founded the genre of man-style in Russia and announced fashion and style as the new language of contemporary art. Ostretsov's work heavily references comic books; hero and villain are crystal clear, and the struggle between humanity and a ruling government is evident.

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Ostretsov was born in Mosow in 1967. He graduated from the School of Theatre Design at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1984 and began to work as an artist, showing his work at numerous exhibitions. In 1988 he moved to Paris, where he lived and worked for ten years, including three years as artist and designer at Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.

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The artist manages to preserve the provocative ambiguity of his whole project, and to remain in an invulnerable position of independent social criticism, invariably quick-witted and precise. The large canvases and installations are executed in the aesthetics of comics, mixed, as it were, with the accidental intrusion of the street, which spoils the totalitarian message with its colorful blotches and dirt. Ostertsov splatters bright colored graffiti across the picture plane creating his style suggestive of techno folk art. His images of the destruction of capitalists and greedy authoritarian systems of control suggest a redistribution of energy and power. The artist doesn't treat Fascism, Stalinism or Capitalism, as implicit 'enemies' but regards any system of government that seeks to progressively tailor society as such. The power of his images lies in his universal message and mission.

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Gosha now lives and works in Moscow.