George Pusenkoff

George Pusenkoff spent most of his formative years in Moscow. In his early career, Puskenoff worked predominantly with acrylic, rendering vibrant forms at various stages of abstraction, though he gave them titles that anchored them in specific narrative contexts, often referencing historical (and art-historical) subject matter, as in Kidnapping of Europe (1988) and Bronzino, Ciccolina and Yves Klein (1992). Pusenkoff painted his first digital border in 1996, simulating the 8bit look of the first computerized windows. He continued to experiment with the visual language of the computer screen, at times using just the browser window bar as an abstracted geometrical form. Mass culture has always been subject to imitation and consideration in Puskenoff’s work, including icons of the post-digital age as cyber-culture has become increasingly ubiquitous. In 1996, Pusenkoff painted his version of Andy Warhol’s take on the iconic Renaissance Da Vinci original: his silk screened Mona Lisa (1999), surrounded by a browser box, became the basis for an ongoing, travelling installation, exhibited internationally in site-specific structures made up of repeating Mona Lisa modules. The series is representative of the artist’s tendency to appropriate charged symbols from art history. Pusenkoff's work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, Moscow's Museum of Modern Art, and the 2005 Venice Biennale.