Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe was an appropriation artist and a key figure in the Russian art world of 1990s known for his charismatic personality. He first dressed as Marilyn Monroe while serving in the Red Army in the 1980s, and his costumes led directly to his early discharge. Beginning in 1986 he participated in exhibitions of the New Artists and in the orchestra “Popular Mechanics” under Sergei Kuryokhin. In 1989 Mamyshev-Monroe co-founded the video project Pirate TV, imitating Soviet television. Mamyshev-Monroe impersonated a wide range of famous personalities, from Soviet-era divas Alla Pugacheva and Liubov Orlova to Queen Elizabeth II, Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Putin. His work has been shown in History of Russian Video Art: Volume 1, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2008); Horizons of reality, MuHKA, Antwerp (2003); and Territory of Arts: Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques at Leningrad’s Russian Museum (1990), among other exhibitions. In 2007 he won the Kandinsky Prize.