In 2007, Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick included Kozlov into the list of 100 “great solitary masters”.

[4] Kozlov regularly participated in the New Artists' exhibitions, first in Leningrad and later, at the end of the 1980s, internationally (US,[5][6] Sweden,[7] England,[8] Finland, Hungary, etc.).

[11] Many of them represent the second Russian avant-garde in art and music: Georgy Gurianov, Oleg Kotelnikov, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Timur Novikov, musicians Sergey Kuryokhin, Viktor Tsoi, the ‘New Composers’ Valery Alakhov and Igor Verichev, among others.

To an extent, the camera was for Kozlov the same as a sketchbook for artists of the past in so much as it captured and preserved a moment of inner life for future interpretation.

[14] During the nineteen eighties, Kozlov repeatedly turned his attention to the polarity between Russia and America as a factor in world affairs affecting the spiritual state of the Earth.

Anticipating the struggle for a tri-polar distribution of forces, Kozlov saw China joining the concert of the world powers – as portrayed in the painting CHINA-CCCP, from 1987, which depicts both of these protagonists as guitarists.

[18] In 1990, the Austrian performance artist Wolfgang Flatz teamed up with Kozlov for a body-painting session;[19] this was filmed for the public by ZDF, the German TV channel.

The same year, he began building up a unique collection of art, “2x3m”, inviting Leningrad artists to his studio to produce a work in this format.

The initial contributions were made by Oleg Kotelnikov, NIKA (Elena Bogdanova), Ivan Sotnikov, and Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe.

Kozlov's works included three large paintings from his series “New Classicism“ (“Новая классика”) which were characterized in an art journal as “self-contained and yet irritating to such a degree that they would hold their own in any exhibition.”[24] In 1994, with support from the OTIS company, Hannelore Fobo and Evgenij Kozlov opened “RUSSKOEE POLEE 2” in Berlin; the studio, a 400 m2 factory space, ran until 2008.

Sixteen “miniatures”, original paintings on fabric in a 5 x 2 m format similar to gonfalons, were hoisted on flagpoles around the Großer Stern on June 15, 1995.

[33] After having been appointed curator of the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), Gioni decided to make them part of the main exhibition entitled “The Encyclopedic Palace”.

[37] To date, the series consists of more than 450 original graphic works and the same number of so-called “light boxes” which are also drawings but carried out on semi transparent paper.

Kozlov sees this tendency best represented by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sigmar Polke, Neo Rauch.