Morning in a pine forest. Lamp

The artist takes everyday objects from the low to the high, creating rubber monuments to a teapot, a skate, a razor... This tradition originates in the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, and Kozin repeatedly turns to this artist, as well as to Picasso, Malevich, Tatlin... 

"High and Low. Picasso's Guitar with a Flyswatter and a Mousetrap" demonstrates the principle of illogicality discovered by Malevich in his "Cow and Violin" (1913), when in one work the incompatible is combined, and the artist rejects ordinary logic. Mousetrap Matyushin, Malevich, Filonov, Kapkan Tatlin - this is an homage to the main heroes of the early twentieth century and at the same time a dispute with the avant-garde, which declared war in art. Kozin is a pacifist, withdrawing traps and mousetraps from circulation as murder weapons. Thus, for the "Mousetrap Museum of Contemporary Art", founded by him in 2000, he bought mousetraps and gave them to his artist friends to create works, thus transforming the art of war declared by man on the animal world into the history of art. In contrast to the "Mouse Museum" (1965-77) by Claes Oldenburg, it is not the heroic Disney mouse that is symbolized, but the weapon of destruction of its living prototype.

"Reconstruction: Mouse Trap" is a conceptual work and a protest against murder, as is "Little Pacifist" - a child's shirt made from a car tire, crucified by the sleeves with two mousetraps. Traps and mousetraps placed along the artist's path continue Kozin's recurring theme - awareness of one's place in the history of art.

Text: Olesya Turkina