30x48x2 Oil, wax, archival paper and obsolete bank note on panel.
Artist: Brian Drake
Date: Summer 2020
Series: Broken Bank Note
NOTES & DETAILS
Overpainted on authentic 1980's Communist-era Polish złoty, this companion piece to Polska Drop offers a critical examination of the Eastern Bloc’s collapse. Designed to evoke the visual scale and structure of currency, the work interrogates the failures of Glasnost and Perestroika, repurposing defunct Soviet-backed banknotes as both material and metaphor. The layered composition—featuring concentric rings, textured surfaces, and intersecting fields of color—disrupts traditional notions of value, authority, and economic stability. By transforming a relic of a dissolved political order, this work from the Broken Banknote collection challenges the viewer to reconsider the ephemeral nature of state power and the economic ideologies that underpin it.
This piece is a subtle reflection on the end of highly manipulated
currency backed by Soviet doctrine and failed economic policy, brought on by the rise of the worker class and the Solidarity Movement. Activism can bring about change.
PAST SHOWS: Hopkins Center For The Arts, Minneapolis, MN
Core New Art Space, DENVER, CO
