Vitaly Komar is a Russian painter and performance artist who was born in Moscow in 1943. He attended an art school in Moscow from 1958 to 1960, after which he studied and graduated from the Moscow High School of Industry. He began cooperating with Alexander Melamid in 1973 and collaborated with him until 2003, when the two separated to pursue individual work. Komar currently resides in New York City, USA, and has had solo exhibitions at the Moscow Biennale and the Galerie Sandmann (Berlin, Germany).