Valentin Korzhov was born in Moscow and received training in sculpture at the art academy and began his professional career at the studio of master sculptor Victor Sidorenko. That was the place where he could master his skills in work with a material and soon he started his own experiments with plastic forms as a reflection of his philosophical ideas. In his work, neoclassical depictions of the body merge with postmodern ideas about materiality, origin, and relic.

Valentin Korzhov may be attributed to an artist-philosopher due to his deep research and manifestations of his reflections on European ancient and modern philosophy in his artworks. His recent sculptural projects present a visual narrative on the existential crises of humanity at the end of postmodernist age and at the same time on attempt to find a fulcrum in fundamental philosophical and religious texts. In his highly psychological figurative sculptures text plays a vital role inheriting the idea of logos as a primary property of a human being anticipating his appearance.

The sculptural practice of Valentin Korzhov can be summarized as absolute spatiality, heading towards a dynamic aesthetic of space. Under the influence of Heidegger’s phenomenology and its unusual notion of nothingness as the fundamental ground of existence, Korzhov places his sculptural interventions, uncanny narratives on material and self, in the ontological ground zero of the voids. In a  wider perspective, Korzhov is interested in exploration of form and space and its relation with each other. This’s, according to German philosopher, the only condition where the form can reveal itself.

Temporality is dislocated in Korzhov’s work, reading the palimpsest of civilization as a complex tapestry of interwoven texts, images and archetypes, moving away from the historicism of sculpture towards a primeval site of mythography that encompasses the distant future as well. 

“My objects reflect the process of transfiguration of existence into time, infinity into immediateness. I try to palpate the channel of communication between eternity and time, the channel that works in either direction”, - Valentin Korzhov.

Valentin Korzhov is a member of the sculpture section in the Moscow Artists’ Union, and he has held solo exhibitions in several institutions, including Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, State Darwin Museum, the 5th Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Tashkent and Media Center of Zaryadye park in Moscow. In 2020, Korzhov became one of the finalists of the renowned Arte Laguna Prize for his hyper-realistic and thought-provoking sculpture The Brain that Passed Away. He is an author of a large-scale public multi-media sculpture Observer of Immense Space dedicated to Yuri Gagarin. Gallery exhibitions include Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, Cube (Moscow) and Art Catch (Utrecht). Korzhov lives and works in Moscow. His work is regularly featured by the leading Russian media and can be found in a number of public and private collections.