Groys was born to Russian parents in the Soviet sector of Berlin, which became the capital of East Germany. He attended high school in Leningrad (known since 1991 as St. Petersburg) and from 1965–1971 studied mathematical logic at the University of Leningrad, subsequently working as a research fellow at various scientific institutes in Leningrad. From 1976-1981 he served as a research fellow at the Institute of Structural and Applied Linguistics at the University of Moscow. In 1981 he emigrated from the USSR to the Federal Republic of Germany, where he pursued various scholarships. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Münster, Germany.
During his time in the Soviet Union, Groys participated in the unofficial cultural scenes of Moscow and Leningrad, publishing in 37, Chasy, and other samizdat magazines. In 1979 he published the essay “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism” in the art magazine A-YA, in which he coined the term applied to the art movement “Moscow Conceptualism.”
Groys is a pioneering theorist in reflection on socialist art and postmodern art, without evaluating either. Western thinkers such as Clement Greenberg had criticized socialist art, especially socialist realism, for being mass art and made it an aesthetic taboo. Groys re-evaluated socialist art production, challenging the norms of aesthetics by pushing a thesis based on Walter Benjamin in the very interpretation of politics, claiming that modernism had survived in the "total artwork" (Gesamtkunstwerk) of Stalinism.[1] This thesis is charged with having pushed a new generation of thinkers into re-evaluating the Socialist aesthetic heritage (among others Miško Šuvaković, Marina Gržinić, and Ana Peraica) recognized as the discourse of post-socialist art.
Groys has also published Thinking in Loop: Three Videos on Iconoclasm, Ritual and Immortality (DVD, 2008). The videos were produced between 2002 and 2007. Each of these videos combines a theoretical text written and spoken by the author with film footage fragments taken from different movies and film documentations.
