Art News

Architecture of the former Soviet Union dominates new exhibition at Blain/Southern

LONDON.- The imposing architecture of the former Soviet Union dominates many of the paintings featured in Remains of Tomorrow, Romanian artist Marius Bercea’s debut exhibition at Blain|Southern. Initially these edifices appear like props in a futuristic movie – Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) offers an immediate point of comparison. This is further enforced by the verdant landscapes in which they sit, an environment where bathers plunge into crystalline swimming pools while others stare in apparent wonderment at the giant, modernist designs surrounding them. However, closer inspection reveals the buildings to be crumbling, the whitewashed concrete degraded with age and neglect. And while the skies in some paintings are an idyllic blue, most are an ominous, sulphurous yellow, hinting at a terrible Chernobyl-like disaster, or worse. Growing up in Cluj, the Transylvanian city which has seen a flowering of ar