The art of Alexej Koschkarow, a Belarussian who recently graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, is something quite out of the ordinary. Katharina Fritsch felt so challenged by Koschkarow’s baroque, kitschy images that she invited him to participate in a joint exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1999, where he erected a park landscape with hedgerows among which nestled bronze statues of strange adolescents masturbating. “What’s this supposed to be?” was a question often heard during that exhibition. In an interview, Koschkarow himself spoke of his feeling of confinement and of