Marina Pinsky artwork

1000, 2022
Artist: Marina Pinsky
1986, American, born in Moscow, Russia. Lives and works in Brussels and Berlin.

The work consists of twenty bronze models placed on Belgian bluestone and powder-coated steel bases representing different districts of Brussels. Spectators can view the city from multiple angles as they move through the building. These irregularly-shaped plots of land, sometimes pushed up to the peripheries of Brussels 1000 and its borders with surrounding communes, are like pieces of a puzzle that viewers are free to touch and to put together in their minds. Traces of wear appear as polished surfaces over time, showing the public's changing relationship to the city. Some flat areas have been polished in advance, as an invitation to explore the sculptures' topographies.

Marina Pinsky makes these models using the traditional lost-wax casting technique. A team of modelmakers including Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta, Hadrien Gerenton, Joseph Hoyt, Christopher Brendan Morrison, Vincent Nuyts, Aya Salim, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Charlie Usher and Daan Vanbrabant sculpted these quarters of the city in cardboard meticulously by hand, using Google Earth as a visual reference. These cardboard models were then dipped in wax and the details and surfaces were melted and sculpted back into the material.

The sculptures were then recast entirely in wax again before being enclosed in refractory material and cast at a nearby bronze foundry, Kunstgieterij Van Geert in Aalst. The use of bronze is closely related to the history of the site where the Administrative Centre now stands. It refers both to the green and black natural patina of the artefacts found during the archaeological excavations that preceded the construction of the building, and to the bronze sculptures that can be seen throughout the City of Brussels.