Typology: Installation
Date: 2012
Location: Thessaloniki
Client: Greek museum of modern art
Material: metal, wire string, wood (mdf), insulator (dow)
Color: white, grey
Status: prototype

 

“One Point Chair” is an installation designed after invitation, for the Greek museum of modern art, as a contemporary comment on the Russian Avant Garde scene.

The project  is a spatial-dynamic, geometric construction. Specially designed volumes, are hunged by wires which stretch between a single point (observation point) and several distinct points on the surface of the wall, in order to visualize a chair, in an imaginary vertical plane between them.

The construction, consists of an observation point and its base, the suspended volume pieces (15 in number), the supporting wire strings (4 on each piece, 60 total) and the surface shapes that are placed on the floor.

Depending on where the observer stands in relation with the project, a different visual composition of the volumes, that make up the chair image, is created. The chair image, is simultaneously mutated with any of the observer’s displacement, to only appear clearly when the observer looks through the particular point of observation.

Assuming that there is an imaginary light source behind the project, on the side of the wall, the shadows of the suspended pieces, are projected on the floor surface. For the project, these shadows, acquire materiality, thus forming a composition on the floor, in order to reveal the influence of the project, through the morphological similarity with original painting compositions of the Russian Avant-Garde movement.

 

 

 

The depiction of the chair, has a special meaning for the project, as it refers to the concern and willingness of the Russian avant-garde artists, to create utilitarian objects and constructions for ordinary people, through the flourishing industry of the time.

“… In structures that are executed on the surface, the ‘construction’ constitutes only the projection of a potential real structure, which forms on surface just one specific type of plan or design, not a construction itself. A construction, which in the pure sense of the word is to organize a real object, can only be made as material. “Aleksander Rodchenko, The Line_Art into Life, 1921

The project, is a comment on the relationship between a surface representation (painting) and a construction in space, that constructivism had brought to the fore at the time. Three-dimensional works and installations, swinging utopian constructions, flying sculptures and dynamic cities, were issues that gave the Russian avant-garde era artists, vision and theme.

The materials of “one point chair” are: metal, wire string, wood (mdf), insulator (dow). The colors are shades of white and grey.

ABOUT THE COSTAKIS COLLECTION OF RUSSIAN AVANT GARDE ART

The dynamic influence that the Costakis collection continues to exert on even the younger generations of artists -and not only – is highlighted by the latest exhibition of the State Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition, titled “Composition- Construction-Production / The Russian Avant-Garde and Contemporary Art”, inspired by three words that were very important for the Russian avant-garde art movement, since they can be found in many works of the period. These words serve to describe the stages and evolution of the movement, from the early geometrically abstract experimentations in painting to constructivism and the industrial – scale production of utilitarian objects.

January 20 – April 14 of 2012  at State Museum Of Contemporary Art  – Moni Lazariston / Thessaloniki 

open from Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00-18:00 (closed on Mondays) / free entrance