Dmitrii Prigov was born in Moscow in 1940. He graduated from the Stroganov Institute in 1967 and became a member of the Soviet Union of Artists in 1974. Within the Moscow underground artistic community, Prigov was better known as a poet than as an artist. Several dozen of his poetry collections developing Conceptualist ideas were published in Samizdat, and early on he secretly recorded a performance with the musician Vladimir Tarasov.
Prigov’s first visual experiments relate to American Pop Art. He assembled cans that made reference to Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup artwork. Prigov often uses ready-made objects in his work, such as clichéd lines from Soviet newspapers. In the early 1990s he began a series of installations that involved newspapers as symbols of the waste of civilization. In 1995 he was awarded the International Pushkin Prize. Prigov has died in 2009.
