Scenes from the Future: Guggenheim Museum (in ruins)

Vitaly Komar, artist

born 1943

Aleksandr Melamid, artist

born 1945

Scenes from the Future: Guggenheim Museum (in ruins), 1990

Portfolio/Series title: Scenes from the Future

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: etching; wove paper

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 605 x 440 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 753 x 562 mm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 23 13/16 x 17 5/16 in
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 29 5/8 x 22 1/8 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 32 x 24 in

Credit line: Museum purchase: Friends of the Art Museum

Accession number: 1991.0006

Not on display

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In a sparsely vegetated landscape, a circular structure lies in ruin with a tree growing in its center. This building is the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, an icon of American architecture designed by the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright. Once a bustling tourist destination in the center of New York City, the museum now slowly crumbles and decays in a pastoral setting.
In 1975, Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, who collaborated as an artistic team from 1973 to 2003, produced their first artwork on the subject of abandoned buildings. Komar and Melamid were inspired by the eighteenth-century French artist Hubert Robert and his paintings of ruins. Later, they created two etchings on the same theme that illustrated the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art in ruins. In pencil in the lower right of this print the artists have written: “To our Friends at Spencer Museum. From Future with Love!”