Alexander Brodsky    Apr 5 - May 10, 2008

Almost everything that he [Brodsky] does is a memorial or a monument to people, things, events, and cities. These monuments are covered in mysterious signs of time; they disintegrate, turning into ruins and primary material, sand. … not so much a tragic metaphor as an elegant and ironic commentary on the inevitability of fate.
Eugene Asse, curator of the Russian Pavilion at Venice, 2006

Alexander Brodsky, a Moscow-based artist/architect, whose themes relate to memory and the passage of time, will exhibit three installations at the Ronald Feldman Gallery. Brodsky returns to New York after his recent collaboration on the production of Beckett Shorts at New York Theatrer Workshop with JoAnne Akalaitis, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Philip Glass. As set designer, Brodsky fashioned an abstract environment which included a landscape of sand.

Incorporating modest materials and layered with metaphorical associations, the exhibition is an elegiac commentary on the impermanence of life and human endeavor. One installation consists of a line of clay heads that stare at television sets implanted in the back of the head that precedes it. The strange iconography of the heads, pocked and etched with age, alludes to a collective subconscious memory of unrecorded civilizations. Encased in a vitrine in the manner of archaeological museums, a second installation displays drawings on used tea bags aligned like a field of gravestones or a miniature Stonehenge. In the third installation, pieces of paper with hieroglyphic-like writing flap in the breeze created by a fan – the winds of time. A master of evocative lighting, Brodsky will also exhibit paintings, applied directly to the surface of light boxes.

Alexander Brodsky, a graduate of Moscow Architectural Institute in 1978, worked as a paper architect in collaboration with Ilya Utkin until the fall of the Soviet Union. Their fantastical proposals, which have been published in Projects, a portfolio of etchings, won numerous prizes in international competitions. Brodsky’s previous exhibitions in New York include Canal Street Subway Project (1997), commissioned by the Public Art Fund, and Grey Matter (1999), a dream-like environment of objects fashioned from unfired clay, which was exhibited at the Feldman Gallery. He received First Prize Museo del Presente, Milan for his installation, Coma, depicting a city partially submerged in crude oil. Recent exhibitions include Moscopolis, Espace Louis Vuitton, Paris; RUSSIA!, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; and the 2002 Biennale of Modern Art, San-Paulo. Museum collections include The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg, and a permanent commission for the European Ceramics Work Centre, Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands.

Brodsky’s architectural awards include the Moscow Arch First Prize in 2001 and 2005. He represented Russia at the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture and was included in the 2004 First Biennale of Architecture in Peking.

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 5, 6 – 8pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am – 6pm. Monday by appointment. For more information, contact Sarah Paulson at (212) 226-3232.