Storefront for Art and Architecture Pops Up in L.A.

The Sunset Boulevard space will debut during Los Angeles Art Weekend.

Nicholas Tamarin -- Interior Design, 3/14/2008

Retailers have brandished pop-up shops as brand-building exercises for years: Target on the Hudson, J.C. Penney in Times Square. But next month, Storefront for Art and Architecture takes a stab at appropriating the concept for the global art scene.

The New York gallery is establishing a series of temporary exhibition venues, or Pop-Up Storefronts, beginning in Los Angeles on April 11. Another transitory gallery will follow in Milan later that month. Then it’s on to London in June, and Yokohama, Japan in September.

The West Coast Pop-Up Storefront, opening during Los Angeles Art Weekend, will be located on the Sunset Boulevard site of Paperchase Printing. The opening exhibit is "CCCP (Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed)," a showcase of French photographer Frederic Chaubin's images of the architectural artifacts of the former Soviet Union. Chaubin, editor-in-chief of French lifestyle magazine Citizen K, traveled through Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine over the past five years, documenting the work of local architects from the 70's and 80's.

The designers of the buildings, working on government commissions, drew inspiration from expressionism, science fiction, early European modernism, and the Russian Suprematism art movement -- not exactly the dreary urban scenes often associated with late Soviet architecture. Many of the buildings have never been collectively documented or exhibited before. The exhibition also traces the intellectual and political undercurrents that shaped the architects through film stills, drawings, magazine articles, and historical timeline maps.

"CCCP" opened to critical acclaim last April at the original Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York’s SoHo neighborhood.

From top: The Los Angeles Pop-Up Storefront on Sunset Boulevard. A Frederic Chaubin photograph of Druzhba, a 1985 building in Yalta, Ukraine by architect Igor Vasilevsky, for the CCCP exhibit.
                                                                                  
Images courtesy of Storefront for Art and Architecture; Frederic Chaubin