START POINT PRIZE – Prize for emerging artists

A fascination with architecture, both utopian and fantastic, is one of the themes appearing in both the old masters and in modern art, as shown by Brueghel’s Tower of Babel and the interiors of prisons by Giovanni Battista Piranesi on the one hand and projects by the Futurists or the Alpine architecture by Bruno Taut on the other. A similar theme also appears in literature (Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino) and the most, of course, in film with its unlimited possibilities of simulation. Similarly in fine art we have encountered the theme lately in genres connected with pop culture, for example in Japanese origami of the 1990s (Leiji Matsumoto, Hayao Miyazaki, Kunihiko Yuyama). The utopian city takes various forms, beginning with ancient places of exotic cultures to residential spacecrafts floating in outer space. This theme is often about merging both principles – the futuristic and the historical, the same as in the work of Lefteris Kiourtsoglou who draws inspiration from the above-named sources and in his models and drawings he adds another layer of originality to this genre. (mf)