«The architecture of the leaving.» Alexander Brawlov. The text for the exhibition.

From the opening text of the exhibition: «Alexander Braulov offers a completely new way of thinking and understanding the Soviet architecture of the first post-revolutionary decade. He uses naive, from the point of view of the generally accepted hierarchy of genres, while at the same time using one of the oldest technology of decorative applied art. On a black background, on a rough patch of fabric, with a reduction in colour, in detail, the stitches to the stitch are drawn in lines of power plants and kiosks, stadiums and depots, cultural houses and hangars. Both the ornament of the ancient Russian embroidery store, in its simplified geometry, the symbols of the collective myth, and here the designist half-ruin turns into a monumental sign. Thanks to a conditional „poor“ gesture and homemade embroidery, the personal children’s „relics“ collected in a candy box, or home pictures in an album, are a special form of invaluable personal memory that is usually of interest only to those who keep it. In the case of embroidered architectures, the sharpness of personal experience is transferred to the common heritage, recording the fragments of the history of the art of the twentieth century in the history of our common memory.» Xenia Malic