Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid first met in 1963 as students at the Stroganov Institute of Art and Design in Moscow. They began collaborating in 1965, then in 1972 started performing as an art-group. After graduating, they participated in several avant-garde exhibitions, and were expelled from the Moscow Union of Artists. They emigrated to Israel in 1977 and a year later moved to New York, where they continued to work together.
In 1972 they presented the new term “Sots Art” as an opposition to the pop-art and as a descriptive statement to talk about the Soviet art of the time as a whole. In addition, they wrote the Manifesto of Sots Art.
"If pop-art was born by the overproduction of things and their advertising, then Sots Art was born of the overproduction of ideology and its propaganda, including visual propaganda," Komar once explained.