Sergei Tchoban: Toward a New City

Cities must never be confused with the words that describe them. No images can capture their richness and atmospheres. Yet, it is stories and pictures that provoke us to envision our boldest fantasies. Perhaps trying to realize them is our biggest error. It may also be our destiny. The social, geographical, engineering, material, organizational, and experiential potentials of cities have long excited the imagination of philosophers, writers, artists, and architects. Their dreams have become ours as we earnestly attempt to venture into such worlds. Sergei Tchoban’s freehand pencil drawings, watercolors, pastels, and prints invite us to embark on such journeys.

Sergei Tchoban: Toward a New City is an exhibition that assembles 70 hand drawings—from a sketchbook page to large poster-size prints—by the German architect, artist, and collector, Sergei Tchoban. The drawings are loosely organized into several groups—nostalgic ruins overtaken by nature and submerged underwater, inverted and half-split domes, utopian structures that serve as stage settings for the most power-hungry tyrants and pharaohs, multi-perspectival and warm eye views of familiar buildings in entirely unexpected contexts, impossibly cantilevered futurist fantasies, surreal urban scenes overlooked through ordinary domestic windows, sky-pocking spires, and grotesque clashes of architectural styles from different historical epochs, all pointing toward the new city, rushed to be completed while decaying along its edges, the place at once feared and desired.

Curator: Vladimir Belogolovsky, Curatorial Project, New York