Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin are the best known of a loosely organized group of Soviet artists known as "Paper Architects," who designed much but built little in the early days of Glasnost, in the late 1980s. Their elaborate etchings, in which they depicted outlandish, often impossible, structures and cityscapes are of an allegorical content.
Brodsky & Utkin borrow from Egyptian tombs, Claude Nicolas Ledoux's visionary architecture, Le Corbusier's urban master plans, and other historical precedents, collaging these heterogeneous forms in learned and layered scrambles. Underlying the wit and visual inventiveness is an unmistakable moral: that the dehumanizing architecture of the sort seen in Russian cities in the 1980s and 1990s, and elsewhere around the globe, takes a sinister toll.
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