Lelystad Art Project: A Tribute

In 1985, the chief government architect of the Netherlands gave sculptor Lucien Arend a commission to build a sculpture as a tribute to the late Russian artist El Lissitzky. The piece was placed in the Test Circuit and Test Center of the National Road and Transport department in Lelystad. However, in the early nineties it was demolished because the center needed space to expand. Arend was supposed to contribute another piece, but that has yet to occur.

As I was thinking about the concept of this piece, I went back to the original purpose of the sculpture. Lucien Arend was designing a tribute for an avant-garde artist. This means that Arend's concept had to clearly express the avant-garde ideas of Lissitzky.

I decided to do a little research on Lissitzky and found out that he was a suprematist artist. This means that he focused his work on the purity of geometric shapes. Interesting. Eventually, however, he continued to expand on suprematism and develop his own interpretation which he called Proun. This style continued with the foundation of suprematism but further used geometric shapes as 3D objects instead of 2D. Here is an example:

Of course Arend would have also done his research as a sculptor and would have seen the opportunity to depict Lissitzky's Proun in his own sculpture. Ared studied geometric shapes in 3D to find the concept for his sculpture.

We can see that in the final piece Arend retained the geometrical essence of Lissitzky's work. The red rectangle even provides the emphasis needed to contrast both shapes.

As you can see I tried to replicate his work through paper. I tried to study the curves and how I could cut it out of paper. As you can see, curves on paper are near impossible.