Annely Juda Fine Art is pleased to present the exhibition ‘Utopia/Dystopia Revisited’ curated by Yuko Shiraishi and including works by contemporary artists Mariana Bisti, David Greene (Archigram), Tadashi Kawamata, Mike Nelson, Kathy Prendergast, Ben Rivers, Yuko Shiraishi, Alison Turnbull, Richard Wilson and Gary Woodley, as well as works by Frederick Kiesler, Gustav Klucis, Lazar El Lissitzky, Kasimir Malevich, László Moholy-Nagy, Liubov Popova and Georges Vantongerloo. The exhibition also includes a multitude of archival material relating to the Russian constructivist architect Ivan Leonidov, whose work was the starting point for Shiraishi to curate this exhibition.
There have been many exhibitions about Utopia and Dystopia that analyse and focus on the architecture and its history, however this exhibition will explore the artist’s point of view. In John Carey’s ‘The Faber Book of Utopias’ he explains that utopia means nowhere or no-place. It has often been taken to mean good place, but strictly speaking imaginary good places and imaginary bad places are all utopias, or nowheres.
Yuko Shiraishi writes “Utopia and Dystopia are two sides of the same coin. I found that although Ivan Leonidov symbolises this theme, he is only recently being recognised as such. He lived and worked in the Soviet Union as an architect, urban planner and painter from the late 1920s to the 1940s/50s. Almost all his works were never realised as buildings and existed on paper only, with a poetry that many artists can share.”
