Monday 27 October 2014

Monika Sosnowska + Mies van der Rohe




Monika Sosnowska, Tower, 2014. Steel, paint 332.7 x 3223.3 x 668 cm. Installation view, "Monika Sosnowska. Tower", Hauser & Wirth New York, 18th Street, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Genevieve Hanson

New York, NY… Hauser & Wirth is proud to present Monika Sosnowska’s ‘Tower’, a mammoth new work that conjoins architecture and sculpture in order to explore the politics and poetics of space. Known for large-scale, site-specific installations, Sosnowska creates psychologically charged art rooted in existing structures and influenced by the built environment. She manipulates forms – collapsing, twisting, and squeezing steel – into disorienting configurations that not only alter perceptions of physical space but challenge our certainties about memory and our assumptions about societal structures.
‘Tower’ will be on view from 5 September through 25 October at Hauser & Wirth’s downtown gallery at 511 West 18th Street.
For over a decade, Monika Sosnowska has amassed a documentary archive of visual material, mostly photographs made during her walks around her native Warsaw. Recording the conditions of everyday life in Poland, she captures architectural details and structures – workshops, apartment blocks, abandoned buildings, demolition sites, forgotten places – that reflect the heritage, upheaval, stagnation, and rebuilding of the city and the nation’s Communist past. Imbuing a kind of cultural memory in her oeuvre, Sosnowska makes sculpture that manifests recollections, both individual and collective, that collide where ‘architectural space begins to take on the characteristics of mental space’. Her formal language echoes different contradictory modernisms: that of Polish constructivism of the 1930s, the minimal and conceptual tendencies of international art from the 1960s and 1970s, and the Socialist architecture found in Eastern European states.
With ‘Tower’ at Hauser & Wirth, Sosnowska takes on the International Style. Measuring approximately 110 feet in length, this sprawling work is inspired specifically by the design principles of German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the 20th century’s Ur- Modernist, and makes reference to the iconic International Style trope he elevated to sheer physical poetry: the glass curtain wall. With ‘Tower’, Sosnowska quotes the steel framework underlying the hung glass façade of Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago masterpiece, the Lake Shore Drive Apartments, abstracting, disfiguring and bending that framework into a fallen monument. Unmoored from its rational geometry, ‘Tower’ stretches and curves across the gallery’s vast exhibition space. Through Sosnowska’s re-imagining, a coolly elegant, machined, and perfectly readable structure is transformed into something wholly opposite.
Completed in 1951, the Lake Shore Drive Apartments are among the most striking examples of the radicalization of Bauhaus ideology. These 26-storey skyscrapers are robust steel-framed structures wrapped in deceptively sumptuous materials – floating mantles of steel and diaphanous glass – in a synthesis of aesthetics and technology. At the time of their completion, Mies van der Rohe’s residential towers were among the most expensive ever built, vivid symbols of the imaginative forces driving American capitalism. The transparency of the International Style expressed a dream of societal openness that, when deployed in such a refined and luxurious manner, translated into an expression of power and prosperity. Meanwhile, Mies van der Rohe’s elegant statement stood in stark juxtaposition to the ways in which the very same architectural style figured in the creation of a new social order in Poland under Soviet rule.
Sosnowska’s artistic process often begins with the creation of small maquettes and drawings, rooted in motifs of existing structural forms. Her work is then reproduced at a 1:1 scale with assistance from fabricators, technicians, and engineers, employing the same materials used in the referenced object. The huge steel framework of ‘Tower’ was first constructed as a whole, later cut into more than fifty parts for viable transport, each piece ‘sculptured’ under Sosnowska’s direction. The making of ‘Tower’ involved cranes, hydraulic presses, and chains in a labor intensive, heavily hand-worked process. Subverting its material’s prefabricated rigidity, ‘Tower’ twists and contorts the modernist grid to create a sort of reclining figure, a lyrical sculptural object that usurps perfect structural engineering. ‘Tower’ is the latest product of Sosnowska’s current exploration of the curtain wall as architectural motif and metaphor. In one recent work, for example, she reconstructed the glass façade of the Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany, a legendary building designed by Walter Gropius.
A new catalogue will be published in conjunction with the New York presentation of ‘Tower’, featuring photographs by acclaimed Polish architectural photographer Juliusz Sokolowski, documenting Sosnowska’s artistic process from development of her initial ideas through to the intermediate steps of fabrication. Each stage is recorded, capturing the process of creation, manipulation, and change. The images will be complemented by an essay from art historian Andrzej Turowski, Professor at the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon, France.

About the Artist
Monika Sosnowska was born in Poland in 1972. She currently lives and works in Warsaw. This summer Sosnowska held residency at L’Atelier Calder in Saché, France (2014), and many of the models she created there will be the focus of an exhibition at Cahiers d’Art in Paris in fall 2014. Major solo exhibitions for Sosnowska have included ‘Market’, Perez Art Museum, Miami FL (2013); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen CO (2013); ‘Regional Modernities’, Australian Center for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia (2013); The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Scotland (2012); ‘The Staircase/Die Treppe, 2010’, K21 Standehaus, Dusseldorf, Germany (2011); Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Herzliya, Israel (2010); Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Lichtenstein (2007); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York NY (2006). In 2007, Sosnowska represented Poland at the 52nd Venice Biennale, where her work garnered critical international attention for the monumental sculpture ’1:1’ (2007).
Sosnowska will have important solo exhibitions in winter 2015 at the Serralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal, and Maison Hermes Ginza in Tokyo.

http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/2219/monika-sosnowska-tower/view/

Sunday 19 October 2014

Bernd Behr + Le Corbusier





Installation view, Bernd Behr, Amoy Gardens, 2003/07, 35mm slide projection with audio, 34 slides, dimensions variable. 


Amoy Gardens consists of a 35mm slide projection depicting 34 scenarios in and around the eponymous building in Hong Kong, a large-scale development including apartment blocks above a shopping mall. The complex became an epicentre of the region’s 2003 SARS crisis through a malfunction of its ventilation and plumbing systems, leading to a perpetual circulation of the virus throughout its interior. The timed, looped projection is accompanied by an audio recording of a young citizen of Hong Kong reading extracts from Exact Air, Le Corbusier’s treatise on hermetically sealed architecture (The Radiant City, 1933). Her struggle with and re-invention of the manifesto generates a new contingent space between crisis and proposal, event and narrative.

http://www.berndbehr.com

Bernd Behr + Mendelsohn

 
Still from Bernd Behr, House Without a Door, 2006, 16min 32 sec, High Definition video, colour, stereo.

In 1943 the US Army commissioned architect Erich Mendelsohn and RKO Radio Pictures to design and build a replica Berlin housing estate to test incendiary bombs for the Allied war effort. Borrowing its title from the lost proto-expressionist film The House without a Door (Dir. Stellan Rye, 1914), the work approaches the surviving structure through a series of documentary and constructed set pieces. These re-enact imagined screen tests or outtakes, tracing an oblique trajectory from 1920s German expressionist films such as Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse (1922) and F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926) via the film noir of 1940s émigré Hollywood to a contemporary housing development in a place called ‘Faust’ near the Utah test site. The film features a commissioned soundtrack by Marcus Fjellström reflecting the anachronistic timeline of the film.

http://www.berndbehr.com

Bernd Behr "Weimar Villa"




Still from Bernd Behr, Weimar Villa (Unreconstructed), 2010, 9min 28sec, High Definition video, colour, stereo.


Chronicling part of a New Town development in China designed by Albert Speer Jr., Weimar Villa (Unreconstructed) ponders the 'ruin value' of white concrete housing shells set amidst mounds of dug-up earth that make up the new Bauhaus-themed gated community of 'Weimar Villa'. Inhabiting a perpetual moment in the cycle of construction and excavation, the video leaves the development to drift between an incomplete destination and an uncertain origin.

Supported by Arts Council England and Bloomberg Space

http://www.berndbehr.com

Koenraad Dedobbeleer + Mies van der Rohe

Retain a Sense of Proportion, 2009
Formica, wood, latex paint
Dimensions variable
Exhibition view: Boredom Won’t Starve as Long as I Feed it, Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, 2009

From Dissent to Resistance, 2009
Steel, concrete, enamel spray paint
225 x 250 x 160 cm
Exhibition view: Boredom Won’t Starve as Long as I Feed it, Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, 2009

Helen Marten + Loos


Dust and Piranhas. 2011. Video (animation still). Courtesy the artist and Johann König, Berlin; Sadie Coles HQ, London; T293, Naples/Rome.

http://www.helenmarten.com/

Sunday 31 August 2014

Bryony Roberts + Neutra



INVERTING NEUTRA
Installation at the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences, Los Angeles
Supported by a Graham Foundation Individual Grant
July 13 - September 7, 2013
Inverting Neutra is an installation by Bryony Roberts at Richard and Dion Neutra’s VDL Studio and Residences in Los Angeles that offers spatial inversion as a strategy for activating historic architecture. The VDL House is known for its close interlocking of interior and exterior space, in which void spaces penetrate the house from the street up to the roof terrace. The project inverts the spatial logic of the building by filling the void spaces with hanging blue cords, manifesting a latent spatial figure that weaves through the house. This inversion both celebrates and subverts the existing architecture, offering an alternative to the static preservation of modernism and a strategy for creating responsive form

Link to Video
Press Links
Domus, Wallpaper Magazine

Project Links

Neutra VDL House project page, Graham Foundation project page

Copyright Jaime Kowal Photography

Tuesday 3 June 2014

Fujiko Nakaya + Johnson





Photo © Richard Barnes, 2014.

On view May 1 - November 30, 2014


Coinciding with the 65th anniversary of the Glass House and its 2014 tour season, the Glass House presents Fujiko Nakaya: Veil, the first site-specific artist project to engage the iconic Glass House itself, designed by Philip Johnson and completed in 1949.

Nakaya, a Japanese artist who has produced fog sculptures and environments internationally, will wrap the Glass House in a veil of dense mist that comes and goes. For approximately 10 to 15 minutes each hour, the Glass House will appear to vanish, only to return as the fog dissipates. Inside the structure, the sense of being outdoors will be temporarily suspended during the misty spells.

Veil will stage a potent dialogue with the Glass House, producing an opaque atmosphere to meet the building’s extreme transparency and temporal effects that complement its timelessness. According to Glass House Director Henry Urbach, “Johnson’s interest in the balance of opposites is evident throughout the Glass House campus. With Nakaya’s temporary installation, we carry this sensibility to its endpoint while allowing the unique magic of the Glass House — the dream of transparency, an architecture that vanishes — to return again and again as the fog rises and falls.”

The Glass House, situated on a promontory overlooking a valley, is subject to changing wind patterns, as well as variable temperature and humidity, that will continually influence the interchange between Veil and the building it shrouds. Fresh water, pumped at high pressure through 600 nozzles, will produce an immersive environment that reveals these dynamic conditions. According to Nakaya, “Fog responds constantly to its own surroundings, revealing and concealing the features of the environment. Fog makes visible things become invisible and invisible things — like wind — become visible.” The drama of Nakaya’s work rests in the continuous interplay between what is visible and what is not. Known coordinates vanish, only to be replaced by a miasma, rich in changing phenomenological effects, that evoke a sense of mystery, foreboding, and wonder.

This installation is part of a greater initiative to transform the Glass House campus into a center for contemporary art and ideas, in particular those that foster new interpretations of the historic site’s meanings. The exhibition will be accompanied by public programs at the Glass House and in New York City, soon to be announced.

Organized by Henry Urbach, Director and Chief Curator, and Irene Shum Allen, Curator and Collections Manager, Fujiko Nakaya: Veil is generously supported by National Endowment for the Arts, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, The Japan Foundation, and Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope®. Additional support is provided by Mee Industries, Inc.


http://theglasshouse.org/visit/exhibitions/fujikonakaya/

Sunday 1 June 2014

Camille Henrot + Le Corbusier



Architecture Mobile
Carpet: wool and banana, 400 x 300 cm
View of the exhibition “Perspectives”, Espace culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris
© Camille Henrot
Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris

This work is a carpet with patterns of Navajo appearance, containing the silhouettes of iconic monuments of modernist and contemporary architecture (Villa Savoye, Empire State Building, tours Petronas, Grande Arche de La Défense). The carpet, for Le Corbusier, is the most elementary form of architecture - the basis of nomadic settlement and a primordial form of mobile architecture.

http://www.camillehenrot.fr

Tuesday 29 April 2014

Fernanda Fragateiro + Hitchcock







Common Front / Frente Común, 2013

Polished stainless steel, notebooks with inserts of inkjet prints on paper from: "Latin American Architecture - since 1945", catalogue of the first exhibition of modern architecture in Latin America, curated by Henry-Russel Hitchcock, MoMA 1955.

Pages: 14-15, 42, 46-47, 76-77, 91, 104, 112-113, 124-125, 178-179, 182-183, 196-197;
Photos: Armando Salas Portugal, Mexico D.F; Rollie MacKenna, New York; Hugo Brehme, Mexico, D.F; C.U. Molina, Mexico, D.F; Guillermo Zamora, Mexico D.F. Elizabeth Timberman, Mexico, D.F; Foto Industrial, Bogotá; Perez Palacios Salinas.
Monochromes, after Joseph Albers color studies.

118 x 467,5 x 31 cm


Photographs: Miguel Ângelo Guerreiro

http://www.fernandafragateiro.com/maco/common/index.htm










(Not) Reading Modern Latin American Architecture, 2013
Polished stainless steal and Books: "Modern Architects", first architectural exhibition curated by Henry-Russel Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, MoMA, 1932: Facsimile edition published for Lisbon Architecture Triennal, Babel, 2011; and "Latin American Architecture - since 1945", catalogue of the first exhibition of modern architecture in Latin America, curated by Henry-Russel Hitchcock, MoMA 1955
4,5 x 47,3 x 30,6 cm

Dust cover, 2013
Acrylic and dust cover from Book: "Latin American Architecture - since 1945", MoMA, 1955
21,5 x 24,5 x 27 c



http://www.fernandafragateiro.com/maco/others/index.htm

Fernanda Fragateiro + Barragán






After Barragán, House For Luis Barragán, Mexico, D.F, 2013

Acrylic and notebook with insert of inkjet print on paper from "Latin American Architecture - since 1945", MoMA 1955.
Page 184, photo by Armando Salas Portugal, Mexico, D.F.

250 x 30 x 42,5 c


http://www.fernandafragateiro.com/maco/after/index.htm

Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Media Farzin + Villanueva




Architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva in Collaboration with Alexander Calder. Aula Magna auditorium, Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, 1954 (Detail) From the series 'Modern Entanglements, U.S. Interventions', 2006–2009, In collaboration with Paolo Gasparini and Media Farzin
Edition 3/5 + 1 A.P.
C-print from faded 1954 Kodachrome attributed to Paolo Gasparini, wall label with narrative text
Framed C-print: 120 x 120 cm. Installation dimensions variable

Haroon Mirza + Le Corbusier



The Light Hours

http://ashadedviewonfashion.com/blog/light-hours-haroon-mirza-villa-savoye-poissy-yvelines-france-april-3rd-29-june

Leonor Antunes + Bo Bardi





lina
2012
brass tubes and silver wire
196.75 x 78.75 inches

Felipe Arturo + Le Corbusier




Felipe Arturo
Casa Domino, 2010
Reinforced concrete
39.5 x 23.6 x 19.7 inches
Courtesy of the artist

http://vimeo.com/felipearturo

Mauro Restiffe + Costa + Niemeyer





Mauro Restiffe
Empossamento #8, 2003
Gelatin silver print
24 x 30 inches
Courtesy of Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Friday 17 January 2014

Katrina Daschner + Mollino

 
PAROLE ROSETTE
AT / 2012
8 min.
Extremely confident in her mastery of style and taking obvious delight in her citations, in PAROLE ROSETTE, Katrina Daschner uses the performance by a well-rehearsed group of queer couples to stage a controlled game around/about social conventions and (sexual) self-determination, interwoven into an architecturally sublime setting (the Carlo Mollino´s Teatro Regio in Turin). This piece demonstrates, once more, her intricate knowledge--inspired by a combination of fine arts, photography and theater--of style, codes, staging and image conventions as well as of the elements that constitute "classical beauty." Here, she subverts her own so tantalizing abundance of images by cross-cutting them with detailed close-ups and performative interventions, by a storyline that is nearly militaristic in style, and a subtle, yet clear and queer diversity of the individual actors and actions.
Time and again, Katrina Daschner conceives of the stage or exhibition context as sexualized fields of play or performance where processes of desire and power as well as visual regimes are enacted and negotiated. Her films are performative spaces of experience. By connecting theatrical spaces and acts with cinematic elements, she deliberately works with variations of a seemingly familiar mise-en-scène, into which she inscribes subtexts using citations, stylistic set pieces and codes, thereby sounding out the possibilities of the media chosen and cunningly transgressing the limits of its conventions.
(Barbara Reumüller)
Translation: Erika Doucette

http://www.sixpackfilm.com/en/catalogue/show/2015

http://www.katrinadaschner.net