A full scale (80"x141") copy in oil of Ilya Repin's Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire, 1880-1891 is fabricated by a made-to-order painting workshop and mailed to the United States for the exhibition Rotation X, 2009. Cossacks, a painting made notorious as a textbook example of kitsch in Clement Greenberg's 1939 essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, is currently displayed at The State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg and has putatively been seen by only a fraction of those who have read Greenberg's criticism.
-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT