Maschinenwerke_13

drawn summer 2025


This past summer, I moved my drawing practice to a modest studio-shed—part atelier, part tool-cave—where light came in through the dusty windows and the walls smelled faintly of wood and turpentine. It was here, in this quiet enclosure, that I created a new series of large-scale drawings, mostly 70 × 70 cm in size (with one exception that exceeds the format), working with pastels, charcoal, gold leaf, pencil, and, on occasion, ink.

The series emerges as a direct yet transformed continuation of my earlier photo project Maschinenwerke (2019–2025), which documented the quietly collapsing industrial architecture of the collective farm era—structures that were more often improvised than designed, haunted by both utopian intent and neglect. While Maschinenwerke was photographic, analytical, and even archaeological, these new works operate in a different register. They are affective, drawn, and layered with painterly materiality.

In this transition from lens to hand, a tonal shift also occurs: the brutality of concrete and rust is refracted through soft pigment, smoky gesture, and luminous metallic highlights. The works evoke not only decayed industrial memory, but also their ideological residues. Some of these drawings resemble speculative propaganda posters—absurdly ironic in tone—as if advertising the comforts of a remote Soviet labour camp. Stylised references to early 20th-century avant-garde movements—particularly Constructivism and its fragmented visual logic—are not quoted directly, but instead absorbed and quietly distorted, as though remembered through the fog of time or dream.

These drawings insist on a particular technical and stylistic vocabulary. No other approach felt possible; the subject demanded this tension between hand-rendered softness and architectural severity. Upon completing the series, I was struck by a clear sense of closure. This chapter is complete. Something else must begin—and it will, in another form. But these images needed to exist first, as sediment and echo of what Maschinenwerke stirred, and what the summer shed allowed to surface.