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Amsterdam: Vincent Fournier, Brasilia

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Brasília is a city composed of reinforced concrete, a paragon of the tenets of modernist architecture and city planning. Enfolded by the artificial Paranoá Lake, the city fashions a curious structural plane; a grid-like formula of post-war modernism arranged into a light curve. Brasília was constructed in the late 50’s from scratch according to the blueprints by the urban planner Lucío Costa, landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx and the architect Oscar Niemeyer. The three designers proposed a set of speculative opportunities for the future of architectural utopia; future, that some sixty years later has lost itself somewhere in the murky water between the past and present. A far cry from the buzzing city streets of Rio and São Paulo, Brasília is a plateau mostly of purpose-built bureaucratic and governmental settings.

The austerity of modernist architecture lends itself to Vincent Fournier’s photography series that bear the name of the concrete capital. Here, architect Oscar Niemeyer’s work constitutes the backdrop for Fournier’s retrospect of the grandiose dream of posterity. Fournier’s photographs buttress Niemeyer’s consolidated vision that finds its counterpart from the urbanism of Le Corbusier; a political, as well as a technical project concerned with land use and its implications to transportation and physical activity.

Images from that series are part of collections such as the MET, Metropolitan Museum of Art at the permanent collection (New York) and the LVMH Contemporary Art Collection in Paris.

EXHIBITION
Brasilia
Vincent Fournier
Monday 18 April to Saturday 28 May, 2016
The Ravestijn Gallery
Westerdoksdijk 603-A
1013 BX Amsterdam
Netherlands
http://www.theravestijngallery.com
http://www.vincentfournier.co.uk/site/

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