Artist:

Ian Kiaer (born 1971, London, lives and works in London)

Description:

Installation of paintings and sculpture. One sculpture is a model of Melnikov’s Cylindrical House Studio (1929), an architectural design for a house in which Melnikov lived and worked.

“Kiaer’s exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, his first one-person presentation in the United States, was born out of his research into the Soviet architect Konstantin Melnikov. During the 1920s, Melnikov was at the forefront of the Soviet avant-garde, but he refused to conform to the “rules” of Stalinist architecture and eventually turned to painting traditional portraits in his cylindrical house studio. Kiaer’s Melnikov Project creates an allusive arrangement of forms, a poetic invocation of a moment when artists and architects believed themselves capable of transforming the world.” –Aspen Art Museum