Moscow Plastic Arts

Photographs and text by Nicholas Muellner

Arcadia University Art Gallery, Glenside, PA, 2005

48 pages, 22 color illustrations

Distributed by A-Jump Books

Hovering between formalist inquiry and blunt, physical documentation, Moscow Plastic Arts draws on the transitional material, ideological and social status of the rapidly commercializing post-soviet metropolis.  Printed in a rich but faded palette on manila tag stock, these photographs suggest and entwine two heroic models – Socialist Realism and High Sixties Modernism – that are both unavoidable and inevitably absent in the work.  Their frustrated evocations illuminate the tragicomical space between idealist belief and material truth.

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