Nick Muellner // Moscow Plastic Arts

Hovering between formalist inquiry and blunt, physical documentation, Moscow Plastic Arts draws on the transitional material, ideological, and social status of the rapidly commercialising 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.