The value of drawings as artistic process, as a preparation for new sculptures, a new everyday life, a new city and ultimately the Future itself “comes” to the fore in the new exhibition by MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection under the title “Drawing the Future. Drawings on art, architecture and design in the period of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde”, from 30 May to 10 November 2024. The exhibition hosts projects-designs related to the preparation of architectural constructions and installations, with utopian projects that were never realized and presented to the public for the first time, with the design of textiles, clothes, utensils, furniture and even books in the context of illustration.
The liberation of form and the synthesis of the arts as well as the collaboration with the sciences constituted the beginning of an evolutionary artistic process that defines the aesthetic phenomenon of the Russian avant-garde. Art opens the way to change, the world is getting transformed. Sketches and experimentation on paper become more important than a complete painting as they, through their research objectives, acquire the qualities of theoretical and philosophical contemplation of the ongoing utopia.
The process of completing a painting or a construction often gave its preliminary studies the character of autonomous works of art. This is, in some way, a conceptual approach to the artwork, characterized by exhausting the subject through drawings that form thematic cycles. Thus, the work of art is formed in the mind of the viewer and for this reason more emphasis is placed on the process of both production and reception than on the final result.
