Location: ADAM - Brussels Design Museum, Belgium.
Curators: Alexandra Sankova and Konstantin Akinsha
Organized by: Moscow Design Museum, Rodchenko and Stepanova's Archive, Ne boltai! Collection (Prague)
From June 5 to October 8, 2017 the ADAM - Brussels Design Museum welcomes the Moscow Design Museum and its unique exhibition The Paper Revolution. Soviet Graphic Design and Constructivism [1920 – 1930’s] dedicated to one of the most outstanding art phenomena of the 20th century.
The Moscow Design Museum founded in 2012 is the first cultural institution in Russia specifically dedicated to design. The museum plays a significant role in collecting and preserving Russian design heritage in Russia. Having its main objective in popularizing national design at home as well as abroad, the museum presents, for the first time in Belgium, its exhibition on Soviet graphic design. The exhibition is organized in partnership with Ne boltai! Collection and the Rodchenko and Stepanova Archive and will mark the 100th anniversary of one of the most significant and controversial events of the 20th century : the Russian Revolution of 1917.
During its first decade, Soviet Russia, a young revolutionary state, needed its own visual language. A new artistic movement was born from this dynamic and was named Constructivism. Posters, magazines and book covers became the main propaganda tool of the new political regime. Constructivist artists declared the end of the traditional art and proclaimed the beginning of a new era. Social, political changes were happening in parallel with aesthetic changes in the art sphere up until the 1930s. The objective of the Constructivist revolution was to change the role of the artist and to make him/her a creator of the new materialistic world, a constructor of new things. Nevertheless, consumers were not prepared for the minimalistic furniture projects, household goods and clothes. No one was willing to pay for an art transformed into everyday objects. So the aesthetic revolution lived mostly on paper.
Graphic design became the only area where designers could apply their innovative ideas creating covers for books, magazines and posters. Graphic design created by constructivist artists depicted and reflected their time and aspirations. This type of art became the main vernacular of artists who dreamt to conquer the material world but succeeded to conquer it only on paper.
The exhibition will feature eight topics:
- Triumph of the typography – Constructivist font
- Collecting the fragments – Photomontage from illustrations to propaganda
- Suprematism as an embellishment – Transformation of abstract art into design
- Iconography of Constructivism – Political icons
- Magazine cover as a symbol of its time
- Zenith of the style – Anonymous Constructivism
- Power of the image – USSR in Construction as the Biblia Pauperum
- “Vanity books” of the Bolshevik state – Strike labour turned into luxury goods
The exhibition will feature examples of graphic design (posters, books, magazines, postcards) made in Constructivist style by outstanding artists such as Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Gustav Klutsis, Vladimir & Georgii Stenberg, El Lissitzky, Sergei Senkin, Aleksei Gan, Valentina Kulagina, Anton Lavinsky and many others.
