Brodsky & Utkin: the complete works

Abstract

Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin are the best known of a loosely organized group of Soviet artists known as Paper Architects, who practiced in the early days of Glasnost. Many of their elaborate etchings, in which they depicted outlandish, often impossible, structures and cityscapes of allegorical content, were collected in our 1990 book, Brodsky and Utkin. Now, with the addition of several never-before-published prints, we are pleased to announce a new edition of this almost impossible to find book. The designs of Brodsky and Utkin are funny, cerebral, and deeply human. They borrow from Egyptian tombs, Ledoux's visionary architecture, Le Corbusier's urban master plans, and other historical precendents, 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, takes a sinister toll.