A striking eight-meter-tall concrete cube has emerged in the idyllic Austrian countryside of Höflein, near the Schneeberg mountain region in Lower Austria. The geometric structure, built from prefabricated concrete elements and featuring generously sized windows with three skylight strips, stands as an architectural intervention in a landscape otherwise dominated by lush green forests, grazing cattle, and the picturesque rock walls of the Hohe Wand.

Studio X2732, whose name references the postal code of Höflein rather than science fiction robots, serves simultaneously as an artist's studio, exhibition space, and discussion forum. The building was designed, constructed, and largely self-financed by Mascha and Stuart Veech, a married couple who operate the architectural firm Veech x Veech in Vienna. Their architectural intervention, which has been well-received in the region, serves a very specific agenda of creating intergenerational and interdisciplinary dialogue.

The studio currently houses a fascinating exhibition titled 'Border Crossers,' curated by Angela Stief, director of Albertina Modern, running through the end of November. The show primarily features works from the Soviet period of the 1970s by artist couple Vadim Kosmatschof, born in 1938, and Elena Koneff, born in 1939. Both native Muscovites, married for more than 60 years, suffered under political repression and artistic constraints in the Soviet Union before managing to emigrate in 1979 despite significant bureaucratic difficulties.

After migrating through German-speaking countries and operating studios while realizing large-scale projects between abstract sculpture and architecture, the couple moved from Wiesbaden to Höflein in 2011. They now live in an anthracite-colored house designed by their daughter and son-in-law, hidden in the forest above the village and resembling a sideways-placed box. This retreat serves as both sanctuary and creative cell where the two artists continue to saw, mill, cast, weave, and knot new works.

The exhibition showcases Vadim's 'Water Machines,' fascinating and fragile constructions made of industrial porcelain reinforced with golden, pointed metal struts that are visible on the exterior like an external skeleton rather than hidden inside. These playful memento pieces of the industrial age transform the functionality of the apparatus world into purpose-free visual pleasure. Elena's 'Black Reliefs' mounted on the walls create a strong contrast – these knotwork pieces stemming from the tapestry tradition go far beyond conventional aesthetic boundaries.

Elena's works involve weaving, knotting, and braiding threads of sisal and other yarns to create patterns and bulges that give classical high-weaving techniques more depth, body, and plasticity. The resulting patterns and line systems evoke cartographies of absurdity or bizarre mutations with 'writing errors' in their blueprint. These powerful and eerily beautiful positions are complemented and contrasted by works from son-in-law Stuart Veech – opaque objects in the tradition of American minimalism featuring black synthetic membranes stretched like tautly tied skins over metal arcs to their breaking point.

The family's story, which connects urban with rural and organic-biological with technical-industrial in an aesthetic tension, contains the history of political upheavals and artistic revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries like a nutshell. During their early education at the Art Gymnasium in Moscow, when Socialist Realism doctrine was the guideline, the young artists were able to taste the forbidden fruits of the 1920s Soviet avant-garde stored in the basement depots of the nearby Tretyakov Gallery.

These works by universal artists of Russian Constructivism – Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and Kazimir Malevich – were form-destroyers and art-renewers who ignored genre boundaries and moved with weightless elegance between painting, sculpture, architecture, furniture design, stage design, and poster creation. This undogmatic approach to understanding the world also shaped Kosmatschof and Koneff's artistic conception and remains their driving force today.

In collaboration with their daughter Mascha and son-in-law Stuart Veech, spatial concepts and tension-laden object assemblages emerge that take up the Russian heritage and translate it into the lingua franca of a mentally liberated global art. Embedded in the here and now yet equipped with a slightly accent-colored artistic inflection that conjures a heroic avant-garde from the past as a future-oriented phantasmagoria.

Studio X2732 represents a unique project of artistic self-empowerment and stylistic liberation in Austria. 'It's about the willingness to make radical decisions, uncompromisingly and beyond conventions,' says Vadim Kosmatschof, the family's great communicator. He points to the sculpture 'Unfolding Square,' one of the exhibition's eye-catchers – a three-meter-high object made of shimmering aluminum that unfolds with its asymmetrically nested triangular forms like a giant flower, reflecting the surrounding activity. Kosmatschof explains that he has always strived for sculpture not to be a closed object but rather to enter into dialogue with the environment, with light making this transformation from form into event possible.