Ink, Watercolour, and Digital drawing on Watercolour Paper, 2022
Based on Giacomo Quarenghi’s 1797 design for the Bezborodko Palace in Moscow, Design for a Derelict House in the Palladian Style imagines a classical building at the end of its life rather than at the moment of its creation. The work transforms the idealised language of eighteenth-century architecture into a vision of neglect and abandonment. Collapsed floors, graffiti, squatters and improvised repairs occupy spaces originally conceived as symbols of harmony and order. Through the deliberate tension between the formality and precision of the medium and the decrepit state of the palace, the artist proposes that every building’s eventual end is encoded somewhere within its conceptual beginning.
