Alexander Brodsky's first institutional exhibition in Italy, Depth of field, will be on view at MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome) 20 September 2023 - 18 February 2024.
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.
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.
