Richard Meier & Partners is pleased to announce the opening of Richard Meier. Collages starting Thursday, October 30, 2014 at the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Richard Meier is one of the most famous and successful contemporary architects, and one the most consistent American modernists in his attachment to pure forms. As one of the most celebrated representatives of modern architecture, Meier professes in his architectural work a philosophy of purity, restraint and clarity as an antithesis to the chaos of the surrounding world. Strict functionality of form, constructional laconicism and the rejection of decoration and color apart from white, are essential features of the master’s architectural style. As an artist Meier reveals a different side of his artistic oeuvre. When working in the collage genre Meier continues his architectural experiments, contrasting and juxtaposing textures, materials and colors, but on a two-dimensional surface.

Richard Meier’s collages complement his architecture in various, unexpected ways. In sharp contrast to his architectural drawings, his collages are nonrepresentational, yet similarly to the drawings they record the artist’s creative process. Like the architecture itself, the collages explore spatial and social relationships and seek to reconcile the antithetical conditions of random discord and ideal order.

Richard Meier has created collages for almost fifty-five years. But for all the intimate nature of these works, they are effectively an impression, a copy, of the epoch. The polyphony of Meier’s collages is woven from the numerous motifs of the information flow that accompanies the life of everyone who is alive today. The combination of differing materials (in content, form and period of origin) creates an infinite multiplicity of layers, a play of associations and allusions. Meier’s collages are imbued with a postmodernist philosophy that acknowledges de-aestheticisation, the dethroning of the icons of art, the loss of continuity and the devaluation of traditions, but it is this global destruction that asks the difficult question about the essential problems of morality, and provides an impulse for rebirth.

The exhibition shows 38 Richard Meier’s collages from the collection of the Gmurzynska Gallery, and the exhibition will be on display from October 30, 2014 to November 30, 2014, at The State Russian Museum.

Richard Meier. Collages is co-curated by Richard Meier, Mathias Rastorfer and Isabelle Bscher. Additional support is provided by Richard Meier & Partners Architects and Gmurzynska Gallery.

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