Alexander Brodsky & Ilya Utkin

Brodsky & Utkin

Mar 23 – Apr 27, 1990

Alexander Brodsky & Ilya Utkin

Forum de Mille Veritatis, 1990

Description

In their first New York exhibition, Soviet architects Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin will transform the Feldman Gallery into an extrodinary monument to an architectural utopia/dystopia. They will bring to life several of the fantastical images from their prints and drawings.

South Gallery
A colossal arrow will point the way to the Portrait of an Unknown Person in a Coat or Peter Carl Faberge'sNightmare, a sculpture of a figure pushing a giant elaborately etched and embellished 12 foot egg. The doorways will be adorned with intricate sculptural carvings.

North Gallery
A gondolier will light the way through a forest of columns, the Forum of a Thousand Truths:
"Sailing through the forest, walking in the field – maybe a visitor of the
Forum will find at last his own truth – one from thousands."

Founding members of what is called the Soviet school of Paper Architecture, their etchings and drawings will line the walls. The iconography of Paper Architecture merges classical, romantic and modernist imagery. Structures take on anthropomorphic forms, and crystal palaces hover over chasms; there are no limits.

Brodsky & Utkin are first prize winners of the East Meets West in Design Competition (New York, 1989) and multiple award winners of the Central Glass Competition (Tokyo). The artists worked with Eugene Monakhov to design and construct the Atrium Restaurant on Leninsky Prospect in Moscow. In 1989, they were included in a group exhibition "Architecture and Imagination" in Fort Asperen, The Netherlands. They recently had their first U.S. exhibition at the University Gallery at San Diego State University. They will participate in a major travelling exhibition of Soviet conceptual art,"Between Spring and Summer," being organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Tacoma Art Museum to coincide with the Goodwill Games in Seattle/Tacoma.