An architect and artist does not need a special introduction, even to the European public. He is one of the most famous Russian architects abroad. In 2006, his works represented Russia at the Venice Biennale, and now they are kept in the collections of a number of the most important museums in the world: the German Museum of Architecture (Frankfurt), the MOMA Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), the A. A. V. Shchusev. In Europe, Brodsky is known primarily for his "paper" projects: numerous concepts created together with Ilya Utkin for Japanese architectural competitions. Brodsky's "solo" works - installations on the borderline between architecture and contemporary art, as well as a number of small-form objects implemented - interiors, restaurants, conceptual pavilions - are also known in the West.
The works selected for the display cover the period of the last thirty years and give an idea of the various techniques in which the architect works. In the hall of the first exhibition floor of the museum - Brodsky's works in more traditional ones. This is a pencil drawing, etching, silk-screen printing. One floor above - new works created especially for this exhibition: clay "graphics" and ink drawings on roofing felt.
Despite the variety of techniques, the entire exposition looks like a single statement designed to acquaint visitors with the main themes and motives of the architect's work. In the center of Brodsky's poetics are conventional, phantasmagoric worlds, presented, if we speak with a certain degree of convention, in the style of classical architectural presentation: facade, section, perspective, general view. The artist focuses on compositions outside of time, more precisely - after times, traces left by people and history.
In the chamber halls, or, as the museum employees themselves prefer to call them, the “offices” of the lower floor are works of the 1980s - early 2000s. Here Brodsky is the successor of Pyranesianism with its monumentality and phantasmagoricity, however, his gaze is always the gaze of a postmodernist with characteristic irony, layering of meanings and openness to various interpretations. One of the themes is the unity of chaos and classical beauty, postmodern entropy and Renaissance imagery. Its expression is both in chaotic fractal perspectives with the introduction of architectural primary elements - pyramids, and in the appearance of a swinging pendulum under a fractal classical composition, and industrial chaos inscribed in the space of the dome in a longitudinal section, installed on the foundation next to an industrial pipe. Renaissance aesthetics and the motif of the Venetian carnival can be heard in the allegorical portraits of a certain conventional character. On one of them, as if giving a hint to the audience, Brodsky calls him an architect. The rest of the allegorical portraits remind both of the heroes of the medieval mysteries and of the "carnivalized" atmosphere of the comedy Del Arte, and are, among other things, a paraphrase of the famous allegories of the primary elements of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whom the surrealists considered one of their predecessors. Instead of natural primary elements, Brodsky has architectural elements (an ideal city held in the hands of an architect, the Tower of Babel erected on the heads of the characters), and the aesthetics of surrealism is one of the keys to immersion in his worlds.
Brodsky's industrial landscapes are imbued with the same aesthetics. These works are an immersion in the introspective world of the subconscious, in which logical connections are cut off (or, more precisely, they seem cut off), and the world from which a person is removed becomes the hero. The same constant theme with which Brodsky works: a man was here and left traces.
Most of the exhibits were left “Untitled”. Thus, the viewer is deprived of textual clues, which are so accepted in modern art. Of course, Brodsky's ideal viewer is an erudite savvy in history and visual art, capable of counting layers of given meanings, capturing the artist's postmodern irony, while a less sophisticated viewer may experience a slight feeling of discomfort, being thrown into the world outside the usual causal relationships. Two types of viewer - two types of reading, and the interpretations of the non-ideal viewer can be much more emotional and lead to a freer flow of associations.
One of the works closest to book illustration at the exhibition, "A Place of Common Prosperity" (1998), is both a direct greeting to the images of the Piranesi Pantheon, passed through the author's metaphorical subconscious, and an allusion to the solemnly sublime designations of urban infrastructure objects adopted in the USSR in 1960 -x: library - "Temple of Knowledge", and, for example, cinema - "Temple of Spectacles". Here Brodsky uses the "realized metaphor" technique. Before us is indeed the Temple, and the prototype of all the Temples, but the conditional briefcase in the drawing gives out a conditional Soviet citizen, represented in the guise of a mythical creature with a dog's tail, who entered the "Temple of General Welfare" to drink a glass of beer.
In the same space, pencil sketches of conditional architectural facades and a number of objects are also presented. The aesthetics of surrealism are also easily guessed in them, and one of the most mysterious objects depicted is perhaps a kind of paraphrase of the most cited work of Rene Magritte.
The exhibition is organized in such a way that pencil sketches turn out to be sketches for Brodsky's art objects, presented on the floor above. These are works of 2014, most of which were created specifically for the exhibition at the Tchoban Museum. The facades made in the unique author's technique of "clay graphics" refer both to the monumentalism of the Stalinist Empire style and to the Kafkaesque Castle, unattainable within the framework of human logic. Here is the continuation of Brodsky's main theme - the traces left by time. The key to the interpretation of these works, and, in fact, the key to the exhibition as a whole, are two objects made with black ink on a building roofing felt and resembling a map and axonometric model of a conditional archaeological site. The clay facades dotted with cracks are thus nothing more than clay artifacts of the past. It was not without irony in the spirit of postmodernism: building roofing felt is a popular material in Soviet dacha construction.
In this regard, it is interesting to recall the implemented projects of Brodsky the architect. They are not represented at the exhibition, but they are all in the same way subordinated to the idea of concentrating on the traces left by their predecessors. Be it the Pavilion for vodka ceremonies, built for the Art-Klyazma festival, the Rotunda in Nikola-Lenivets or the Prichal 95 * restaurant near Moscow, all of them were built using the designs of other objects that once existed: window frames, doors, boards.
It is noteworthy that the exhibition of Alexander Brodsky in Berlin coincided with another exhibition of architectural drawing at the Martin-Groppius-Bau Museum: "VKHUTEMAS - the Russian laboratory of modernity" (valid until April 6), presenting utopian drawings by students of the VKHUTEMAS of the 1920s. Soviet utopian projects of the 1920s and paper designs of the 1980s are the two main phenomena of paper design of the 20th century hailing from Russia. In the conditions of the rapidly growing economic crisis and the monopoly of large architectural workshops on the design of almost all the most significant objects, a new round of “on the table” design is inevitable. Perhaps the architectural drawings and conceptual projects of the second half of the 2010s may one day become the basis for future museum expositions.
The exhibition is open until June 5, 2015.
