ARTIST STATEMENT
My interest in the intersection between actual, physical landscape and mental landscapes, coupled with recent world events, led me to reflect on the ruins of war and the human impact wars leave behind on landscape. Modernist, constructivist methods of rearranging pictorial space are used to reflect on the scars that wars have left behind, mentally and physically, but also the way that landscape and nature heal these scars and how the events and people who created them become forgotten.
Lost Landscapes series: This body of work stems from observations based on the driving experience. Using freeway systems as the investigative constant, these paintings and drawings attempt to recreate the pure structure of urban landscape. These pictures are not meant to be a representation of the urban landscape, they are landscapes: landscapes for the speeding driver or landscapes for gallery goers. Only minimal elements are chosen for my pictures in order to affect the viewer in a matter of seconds; these images must have only that amount of information, which is essential for the message I am about to deliver.
BIOGRAPHY
Dimitri Kozyrev was born in 1967 in Leningrad, USSR. He moved to the United States in 1991. Kozyrev received his MFA from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000 and his BFA from Ohio University in 1997. Since then, Kozyrev has had multiple solo shows at Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, Mark Moore Gallery, Culver City, CA, Benrimon Contemporary, NY, NY, David Richard, Santa Fe, NM, Golf Coast Museum of Art, FL and Breese Little, London, UK. Reviews of his work have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, Artweek, Artforum, Huffington Post, Art Itd., Artinfo, Wall Street International and many online publications. For the past ten years he was a Professor of Art at The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. He lives and works in Salt Lake City, UT.