BRODSKY, Alexander; UTKIN, Ilya
Cancelled 6/21/90

This beautifully crafted book is part of a series in an ambitious publishing project. Printing quality is astounding. All books are specially printed on four blacks plus a grey and present some hologram parts on cover (in pictures, on corners). Also available in French.

Note that this is the ‘paperback’ version (which isn’t a cheap substitute) of a 1:1 size edition presenting Brodsky and Utkin etchings at the actual size!

Also available is a one page book, with an interview with Alexander Brodsky focusing on Paper Architecture’s work reception in the United States and aslo giving some illuminating information about this publication.

* * *

Cancelled 6/21/90 by Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, is the new publication of their defaced iconic works. Produced in between 1979 and 1989, the 29 etchings, a series of visionary architectural proposals submitted to national and international competitions in opposition to the Soviet architecture of the time, are the founding artworks of the Russian architectural movement “Paper Architecture”. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet system, the engraved copper plates travelled to USA for the production of a limited commercial edition of the works, which requested for the original printing plates to be destroyed. From Autumn 1989 to Spring 1990, from Communism to Capitalism, the mutilated etchings bare the mark of that transition. In Cancelled 6/21/90, published by l’Esprit de l’Escalier, the deep diagonal trench is the cancellation of the artwork as much as the creation of a new one. [publisher’s note]

Published by l’Esprit de l’Escalier, 2017
Architecture / Artists' Books / Facsimile & Reprints / Book Culture