Flying Proletarian

Yuri Avvakumov

1989–1991

A silkscreen on newsprint that overlays a towering, machine-like rocket and rows of repetitive worker figures across a Soviet newspaper, aiming to fuse architectural and industrial imagery into a political critique.

A bold red diagonal mast slices through the gray columns of print, its helix-like trusses and tiny, repeating seated workers forming a mechanical rhythm that simultaneously reads as blueprint, engine, and circus of labor.

Made at the end of the Soviet era, it revives and subverts constructivist visual language—using newspaper as substrate and architectural form as allegory—to question ideas of progress, labor, and technological utopia.

Palette

Art Terms

Silkscreen Constructivism Architecture Ephemera Industrialization Found object Avant-garde

Exhibitions

Deconstructivist Architecture

1988

Revolution: Russian Avant-Garde, 1912–1930

1978

Committed to Print

1988

Contemporary Soviet Art

1974