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Nikolay Polissky

Since the 2000s, Nikolay Polissky (1957) builds transitory constructions with natural materials in the countryside and with the help of the population of Nikola-Levinet, a small village about 100 kilometres away from Moscow. Mudam invited the artist in 2009 to realise an installation of scale for the Grand Hall of the museum, which has been moved afterwards to one of the ditches surrounding it.

The artist realised a series of monumental constructions in elm and rush along with the old moat of the fortress on which the museum is built: diverse futuristic machines, recalling power stations equipped with powerful generators from which emerge thick bundles of cables, dwarfted the visitor. Through their home-made facturing and rustic aspect, the structures recalled old objects from a long popular art tradition while presenting reminiscences of 20th-century Russian modernist and utopian architecture. Marking a shift in Polissky’s pratice, Large Hadron Collider remains a collective venture linked to Nikola-Lenivets where the artist and his team collected the wood and produced the group of elements before reassembling them at the museum.

For 10 years, the wooden structures of the Large Hadron Collider have been exposed to wind and sun, snow and bad weather. According to the principle desired by the artist, the work has melted into the landscape over time and gradually disappeared. The few remaining elements, ruins of a past construction, were dismantled in the summer of 2019. The preparatory drawings for this unusual project remain in Mudam's collection.

Artworks

  1. Nikolay Polissky Large Hadron Collider, 2009

    Ensemble de 20 dessins
    Stylo sur papier
    21 x 29,7 cm
    Commande et Collection Mudam Luxembourg
    Donation KBL European Private Bankers
    © Photo : Mudam Luxembourg

  1. Nikolay Polissky Large Hadron Collider, 2009

    Orme et jonc
    Commande et Collection Mudam Luxembourg
    Acquisition 2009
    Donation KBL European Private Bankers
    © Photo : Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

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