Having worked for the Russian military delivering oil in Siberia, Andrei Molodkin often focuses on issues relating to oil economies and the intersection of economics, politics, and religion. He creates bold mixed-media sculptures in which brief, piercing text passages are combined with real crude oil, as in Cold War II (2006), where the opaque black liquid is pumped through a transparent acrylic casing molded into the shape of the work’s title. In a recent project, Molodkin has attempted to make oil from human corpses, a morbid and boldly symbolic act. The artist also makes large and carefully executed ballpoint-pen drawings on canvas, in which the pens run out of ink during the course of the project and are immediately replaced (the pen carcasses presented with the final drawings), a metaphor for the ephemeral and ultimately expendable nature of human existence.