Ironic Icons

Valentin Popov's art combines images of the superhero in American society with traditional religious iconic art from his native Ukraine. His work is in a number of major art museum collections including the National Museum of Ukrainian Art, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and more. Ironic Icons is his first book.

Valentin Popov was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1956 at the height of the Cold War era. Afforded a classical education of the highest order, he built a burgeoning career in the fine arts but, as a Soviet citizen, found himself chafing under state doctrine which proscribed any art which didn’t conform to the officially approved style of social realism with its propagandistic depictions of patriotic factory workers, farmers laboring in the fields, and other cliches of post-revolutionary zeal. After emigrating to the USA during the late 1980s, Popov quickly assimilated the heritage of western modernism and threw himself into a frenzy of multifaceted artistic production. A past master of pictorial, plastic, and performance media, Valentin Popov is a postmodernist par excellence, combining classical and modernist traditions in a style distinctly his own, at once poetic, technically dazzling, and wryly ironic.