Impossible Architectures: The Works of Filip Dujardin

Starting his career as an architectural historian, Belgian artist and photographer Filip Dujardin has used his knowledge of contemporary vernacular architecture to create a body of remarkable speculative works. Reassembling everyday weathered elements of the contemporary built environment using photo-collage and rendering techniques, Dujardin builds edifices that look both ordinary and utterly impossible.

Above: Untitled, from the “Fictions” series, 2008-2013.

Drab and dream-like at the same time, they heighten both the utopian aspirations of real-world modernism and amplify its failures. Dujardin’s constructions are bleak, labyrinthine, and inhumane while simultaneously alluring in their dilapidated grandeur and complexity.

Above: All untitled, from the “Fictions” series, 2008-2013.

Dujardin’s work has received significant attention in the art world – he has shown in institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In 2017 he was chosen as a featured exhibitor at Chicago Architecture Biennial and developed a series of works that reinterpreted Chicago’s rich architectural heritage.

Above: Two untitled pieces from the Chicago Architecture Biennial, 2017.

You can read a great interview with Filip Dujardin at ArtSpace and visit his website at www.filipdujardin.be.