Atomic City Painting

Andrey Kozakov is a US-based, Ukrainian artist. Abstract architectural scenes are his primary subjects: he paints existing and imagined structures. "The city of Kyiv, with its modern mosaics and Soviet architecture, had a strong influence on my early artistic development." My focus is on the modernist movements that came out of Soviet Russia. The interaction of different objects and space, Constructivism is the way that the lines, the shades, and the colors work together, and how they perform to build structures. My works are inspired by a simple geometric shape or pattern, a compelling play of light and shadow, or an interesting architectural structure. Constructivism continues to engage me because it allows both the artist and the viewer to create their own world around them. You can live inside my paintings; each composition represents a new landscape or construction. They sometimes contain representations of actual buildings, but are often structures arising from my imagination. Each scene is an invented world. When people first see my paintings, they notice the geometrical forms, but do not always realize that the paintings are dimensional. You can turn each structure in your mind and see it from different sides. The abstract representations leave space for the viewer to imagine the complete structure or landscape in their own way. My work has been inspired by Russian modernists and constructivists like Tatlin, Malevich, Rodchenko, Kandinsky, and El Lissitzky, who created Prouns, abstract paintings that represented the intersection of painting and architecture.