Worker and Kolkhoz Woman

Vera Mukhina's sculpture was made in 1937 for the Soviet pavilion at the World's Fair in Paris, where it stood facing the German pavilion and instantly became an event. The architectural part was conceived by Boris Iofan, who also set the motif of the sweeping stride and the raised hammer and sickle. The figures, about twenty-five metres tall, are assembled from sheets of stainless chrome-nickel steel half a millimetre thick stretched over a steel frame, an engineering experiment for its time. After the fair the sculpture was taken apart, brought to Moscow and set up by the northern entrance to VDNKh on a low pedestal that Mukhina herself considered too squat. From 2003 to 2009 the monument was dismantled for restoration, part of the sheets were replaced and it was raised onto a new pavilion almost thirty-five metres high, repeating the Parisian one. The pavilion now houses an exhibition hall, and the group itself once again looks as if it is about to step off its plinth.

On the map