Pyotr Pavlensky, who once nailed his scrotum to Red Square’s cobblestones , says protest is over return to Soviet-era methods

A controversial Russian artist who once nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square has been taken to hospital after cutting off his earlobe to protest at the forced psychiatric treatment of dissidents.

Pyotr Pavlensky, a St Petersburg-based performance artist, climbed naked on to the roof of the Serbsky psychiatric centre in Moscow on Sunday and cut off his right earlobe with a large kitchen knife.

Covered in blood, he was removed from the roof by police and taken to a Moscow hospital. Doctors thought he might also have contracted pneumonia, his lawyer, Dmitry Dinze, said on Monday.

But later on Monday, Dinze told the Guardian that Pavlensky did not have pneumonia or lasting problems from the severed earlobe and would probably be discharged from the hospital soon.

In a statement on his wife’s Facebook page on Sunday, Pavlensky said that cutting off his earlobe was meant to represent the damage resulting from police “returning to the use of psychiatry for political goals”.

Pavlensky wrote: “Armed with psychiatric diagnoses, the bureaucrat in a white lab coat cuts off from society those pieces that prevent him from establishing a monolithic dictate of a single, mandatory norm for everyone.”

The Serbsky centre is infamous for giving questionable diagnoses to many of the dissidents who were confined to psychiatric wards in the USSR. In April, a protester in a demonstration in Bolotnaya Square, Mikhail Kosenko, was sentenced to indefinite psychiatric treatment after the Serbsky centre declared him insane, a decision that Amnesty International condemned as a return to that Soviet-era practice.

Nadiya Savchenko, a Ukrainian pilot who was captured by pro-Russia separatists, is being tried for complicity in the deaths of two Russian war correspondents on charges that human rights groups have called politically motivated. She has been undergoing a psychiatric evaluation at the centre since last week.

Prosecutors have been seeking to have Pavlensky undergo a psychiatric evaluation as part of a vandalism case brought against him after he burned tyres on a St Petersburg bridge in February in support of the Kiev protests that toppled the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovich.

Last week, a St Petersburg district court turned down for a second time a request to have Pavlensky committed to a psychiatric institution. However, on Monday the artist underwent a psychiatric evaluation at the Moscow hospital and was declared sane, Dinze said.

Pavlensky, who has a long history of self-mutilating protests in Russia, gained international attention in November 2013 when he undressed and nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square as “a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of modern Russian society”.

He has also wrapped himself naked in barbed wire in front of the St Petersburg legislative assembly and sewn his lips shut to protest at the prosecution of the punk-rock activists Pussy Riot.