When the Franco-Russian artist Apollinaria Broche first met with Acne Studios to discuss a creative project for their AW 2021-22 collection with founder Jonny Johansson, their artistic interests instantly aligned. Eventuating as ceramic sculptures and jewellery, Broche’s creations complemented a collection that brought together a combination of soothing colours and comforting textures knitted into oversized duvet coats and Swedish country-side linens, inspired by a fantasy of prairie-dwelling nomads living in a dreamscape.
The marriage of oversized shapes and cushioned surfaces spoke to the times, and made the outcome a believable fashion proposition beyond the Swedish house’s digital fashion show captured by the director Casper Sejersen. Flower patches on quilted trench coats and the general sense of youthful mayhem were paired with intricate knitwear as models clasped the artist’s animal ceramics like minaudières, whilst miniature versions appeared attached to chokers or earrings. Fresh out of Les Beaux-Arts de Paris, the sculptor grew up in Moscow’s underground art world before making her way to the French capital.
Broche gave this interview from her workshops in Moscow, in a brief pause from working on her latest exhibition showing at Triumph gallery in central Moscow. “My mother is an artist and she introduced my French father to this whole underground art and music scene in the 1980s,” she recalls. At the time, underground music culture was populated by soviet rock bands such as Kino, headed by Viktor Tsoi, a group originally named Garin and the Hyperboloids after Tolstoi’s novel The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin, a scene both her parents quickly embraced. It was a decade filled with historical changes, starting with the grandiose Olympic Games and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and political restrictions meant that much of the art and music scene remained behind closed doors. In turn, when Broche started making art, she believed in breaking away from traditional methods of creation. Initially she primarily worked with film photography before experimenting with sculpture and installations. Having studied cinematography and theatre studies, Broche then went onto the Beaux-Arts, manifesting a new creative freedom after having been previously trained in still life work and learning to reproduce the incredible albeit classical workings of Rembrandt. “Russian art schools are still very classical and produce masters of contemporary art rather than conceptual art,” she explained, “It’s very ‘welcome to the USSR’!”.