Alexander Melamid came to prominence in his native Russia in 1972 at the forefront of the Sots Art movement — the Soviet answer to Pop Art. Attacking the state’s ideology and propaganda, he saw his work censored and destroyed and his shows closed by the government. To escape this artistic persecution, he immigrated with his collaborator Vitaly Komar in 1978 to New York City. Komar and Melamid quickly rose to teh top of the conceptual art world. Their paintings are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, and MoMA. In 2004, Alexander Melamid broke away from Komar to pursue his own artistic interests.