ROME.- Alexander Brodsky (Moscow, 1955) is a Russian artist-architect, member of the so called Moscow school of Paper Architecture. Brodsky’s work is often referred to as an “architecture of the imagination”, combining a historicist approach with fantasy and the realities of Soviet and post-Soviet urban planning.
From the very beginning, Brodsky has been interested in depth—of ideas, of vision, of field. For his first institutional exhibition in Italy, the artist has transformed the space into a landscape which reflects the imaginative environments that characterize his paper architecture, coiling the boundaries between private and public, as well as material pasts, presents and futures. Brodsky presents tables and a panel made entirely of transparent containers, some of which conceal small objects. The walls host a series of roll drawings and etchings. Some of these depict industrialized urban landscapes with mountainous backdrops, while others present floating objects which develop like a stream of (sub)consciousness. Still others grow horizontally in the form of sequences of animal-like human profiles or human-like animal profiles as well as row of geometric human bodies. A group of light-boxes are scratched on with figurative and abstract signs which recall the window element. The dimly lit tables act as displays for Brodsky’s signature raw clay sculptures—in the shape of buildings as well as every-day objects—made in Rome in the weeks leading up to the show.
Brodsky was formed during the 1970s at the Moscow Architectural Institute (MArkHI) where he studied alongside close friend and collaborator, Ilya Utkin. Like many of their peers, they were disillusioned by the prospect of joining a state sanctioned architectural office and decided to collaborate under the name BR:UT. Driven by an urge to create personal and non- institutional work, they made their name in the 1980s with a distinctive and visually rich set of architectural drawings in the form of etchings—the most common form of creating architectural plates before photography—which they submitted to competitions organized by international magazines such as Casabella, Architectural Design, Japan Architect and Shinkenchiku.
These were speculative, fictional projects in which plans, sections, elevations, axonometric drawings and descriptive texts were compacted onto a single sheet, measuring 60 cm by 80 cm. Characterized by a simultaneous quality of depth and decay, the Piranesi inspired etchings are neither futuristic nor of the past, but rather labyrinthine descriptions of the contradictions and wants, half-way between memory and desire, of life in late Soviet Russia. Rich in mythological and literary references, ranging from Homer to Joseph Brodsky, they depict tropes of built and natural environments: bridges and boats, theatres, archives, prisons and museums, islands and cliffs.
By the early 1990s, Brodsky established himself as an artist and from 1993 he began working on his own, continuing to produce a form of architecture that escapes standard function: most of it stands in the form of drawings, etchings, light-boxes, and raw clay sculptures of buildings and objects, often all deployed at once to create environments or devices for seeing the world differently. In 1996, following a series of exhibitions in the United States, he moved to New York City with his family and settled in an ex-tobacco factory that had been converted into artist studios. This industrial space would inspire the artist’s raw clay sculptures representing factory-like structures. The use of the material itself had come from an earlier encounter with a Moscow factory that produced Soviet propaganda monuments: here, clay was modeled into statues before they were cast in bronze, and then later recycled to form subsequent sculptures, thus participating, through rehydration, in a chain of multiple lives.
In 2000, Brodsky returned to Moscow and set up a studio in the attic of the Moscow Museum of Architecture. He began to receive his first architectural commissions and quickly stood out for being able to build wooden structures out of nothing, through a particular form of bricolage. Much like his speculative artistic projects, his architecture is open-ended and made-up of impermanent or found elements. It expands out of the purely architectural, acting as a foundation upon which life can be layered.
The exhibition places new as well as existing works spanning the 1990s and the early 2000s within a newly conceived installation, to introduce and expand on how architecture too, can be employed as a narrative device.
Alexander Brodsky (Moscow, 1955) is a Russian artist and architect, acknowledged for his role as a key member of the 'paper architects' of Moscow Conceptualism. In 1972, whilst studying at the Moscow Architectural Institute, Brodsky met fellow student and artist Ilya Utkin, with whom he collaborated for the next two decades. Together, they developed a distinct practice that combined fine art and architecture, resulting in large- scale, copper-plated etchings of surreal and elaborate designs. In 2000, he opened his own architectural practice in Moscow where he continues to work. Brodsky's work was presented at Artissima's Back to the Future section in 2018. Solo presentations have been held at Pushkin House, London (2017); The RISD Museum, University of Rhode Island, Providence (2016); Calvert 22 Gallery, London (2013); and Architecture Center Strelka, Moscow (2012), amongst others. He has participated in group exhibitions, including General Rehearsal: a show in three acts from the collections of V- A-C, MMOMA and KADIST, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2018); Museum for Architectural Drawing, Berlin (2017); Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), Lisbon, Portugal (2017); Fortune museum, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA), Moscow (2014); and participated in the Antarctic Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Brodsky has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Innovation Prize (2012); the Kandinskyj Prize (2010); Premio Milano, Museo del Presente, Milano (2001); and with Ilya Utkin, won the East Meets West Design Competition, Jacob K. Avits Convention Center, New York.
