Sunday 27 February 2011

Tilman Wendland + Hansen / Le Corbusier / Niemeyer






Untitled, 2006
Cardboard, masonite, magazine copy,
varible dimensions
Courtesy of the artist & European Art Projects
Photos: Krzysztof Zieliński / European Art Projects

Tilman Wendland (*1969, lives in Berlin) creates from basic, light materials such as paper, cardboard and PVC ephemeral structures, which are integrated in existent architectural situations. They provide comments, criticisms or also caricatures. Normally, his works, which are seldom intended to last, are rendered completely in white. In spite of the strict reduction of colour and form they reveal themselves through a playful-ironic treatment of the subject.
For Ideal City - Invisible Cities Wendland developed a room installation, which enquired into the architectural and city planning shapes and elements of Le Corbusier, Oskar Hansen and Oscar Niemeyer. The ideal city concepts of the architects were condensed by Wendland into space-penetrating white cardboard shelves, sublime and also perishable


Valeska Soares + Niemeyer

Tonight, 2002

Titled Tonight (2002), the video was first installed in the very dance hall where the sequences had been filmed. The soundtrack is a remixed version of Burt Bacharach’s song The Look of Love (1967), altered by Belo Horizonte sound artists O Grivo. A first version of Folly has been shown at the 51st Venice Biennial in 2005.

Anthony Auerbach + Johnson

The State of New York, aerial survey, New York State Pavilion, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, New York, 11–13 October 2006, 2,427 vertical photographs

Saturday 26 February 2011

Lucy Williams + Mies van der Rohe

The Glass-Walled House in Summer 2005 mixed media, 28-1/2 x 28-1/2 x 1-1/2 inches Courtesy McKee Gallery

Jim Isermann + Le Corbusier


Project Unité Firminy
1993
papier peint sérigraphié, linoléum coupé, coussins de mousse
dimensions variables

 via Jim Isermann

Natasha Kissell + Mies van der Rohe


Pink Canyons, 2008, 48" x 42", oil on canvas

Angelina Gualdoni + Costa / Niemeyer

Praca dos Tres Poderes, Noon
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
48" x 84"
2005


via Angelina Gualdoni

Christine Erhard + Lubetkin

Penguin Pool, 200670 x 90 cm

via Christine Erhard

AKassen + Mansilla / Tuñón


Window to the world
Window glass from the facade of the museum is installed in three sets of joined automatic slidingdoors. The piece functions as a kinetic sculpture activated by the movements of the audience and itself.

via AKassen

Christian Anderson + Mies van der Rohe

Installation view: Christian Andersson, From Lucy with love, Moderna Museet Malmö, 22 January-24 April, 2011. Photo: Terje Östling © Christian Andersson/BUS 2011. All works courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin/Stockholm.

http://www.christianandersson.net/shows/from-lucy-with-love

Tuesday 22 February 2011

Fiona Tan + SANAA

 
Cloud Island I, Project for the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2010
2 channel HD installation
colour, stereo
2 HD-cam safety masters, 2 HD projectors, 2 harddisc players, 2 stereo amplifiers, 4 stereo speakers, 1 double-sided white projection screen 2.0 x 1.12 m

Filmed on location on Inujima and Teshima, Japan

Commissioned by the Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation
Funded by Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation and Wako Works of Art, Tokyo

via Fiona Tan

John Riddy + Soane

London (Bank) 2008, 2009
Photograph on paper
image: 720 x 930 mm
on paper, print

Ed Ruscha + Armet & Davis


Norm's, La Cienega, on Fire, 1964, oil on canvas 64 1/4 H x 124 1/2 W (inches)

Ed Ruscha + Pereira



Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1968, oil on canvas 53 1/2 H x 133 1/2 W (inches)

Monday 21 February 2011

Pierre Bismuth + Le Corbusier

Complexe des villas / Bâtiment Le Corbusier (élévation)
2010
Ink on polyacetate
28.35 x 20.47 inches
Pièce unique
Pierre BISMUTH performs the impossible synthesis between the two faces of Le Corbusier: from the villas blanches to housing projects, with a sense of humor and economy of means that are his trademark. He superposes, in a small scale model, section views and computer generated images (Complexes des villas / Bâtiment Le Corbusier, 2006-2010), several Villas Savoye, to create a building that the Swiss architect might not have rejected – let alone the destiny of neglected social housing and the carcass of torched cars in front.

George Maciunas + Le Corbusier




http://fluxusfoundation.com/fluxus-as-architecture/george-maciunas-and-le-corbusier/

Xing Danwen + Holl


Urban Fiction
2004 - present

photography with digital manipulation


My interest for urban subject has been complated in my mind for years but the particular idea of this work was forged some time in 2004 while I traveled extensively in Europe. After being in so many cities in the world, I realized that globalization has made urban landscapes everywhere similar and blurred the boundaries between them. So often, "here" can be anywhere. With this work, I have brought my vision and perspective to these urban spaces.

The architectural structures that I photographed are all maquettes made to promote real-estate developments that are being planned in China today. Some of the buildings already exist, and others will soon begin construction. When you face these models showing such a variety of different spaces and think about the life-styles associated with them, you start to wonder: is this the picture of life today? Do we really live in this kind of space and environment?

Globalization is reshaping our urban environment and our vision of contemporary life - which celebrates the “new” constantly replacing the “old.” As personal living spaces expand with the growth of income, the cityscape becomes more dense, filled up with modern buildings and high-rise towers. People live in cubes that are squeezed next to one another, separated only by thin walls. This physical proximity, instead of leading to greater closeness and intimacy between people, can often create psychological distance and loneliness.

The sculptural form of these new residential buildings, the floor plan of the apartments, and the various interior designs are all related to the inhabitants and their “individual” taste and needs. The models of these new living spaces are perfect, clean and beautiful but they are also so empty and detached of human drama. When you take these models and begin to add real life - even a single drop of it - so much changes.

This entire body of work of "Urban Fiction" is playful and fictitious - wandering between reality and fantasy. All the figures in this series are acts of me, playing different characters. This creates another paradox: “I” am real but at the same time “I” am unreal. The figures act out totally imaginative roles and fanciful stories, staged within the maquettes, their plots invented by me and visualized for these spaces. For example, “I” am a white-collar office worker brought to despair by job pressures and spiritual emptiness. Sometimes “I” am a materialistic woman enjoying a life of pleasure and dissipation. Or “I” am a young girl who, in a moment of unrestrained rage, accidentally killed her lover. Together, the resulting pictures compose an episodes, serialized narrative structure for "Urban Fiction". As a whole, these images represent the state of urban life today.

In the period of my childhood in China, skyscrapers were unattainable concepts connected to the West, viewable only in films or magazines. Today I live in the pictures I make and I, along with my compatriots, can imagine our future by bending down to examine tiny models of buildings. This, perhaps, is another reality of the "fantasies" which govern our contemporary life.

The photographs are shot both digitally and on film and manipulated, creating many layers, utilizing computer program tools.

The medium is photographic C - print.
Large size: DIASEC (back-mounting on dibond, face-mounting with Plexi-glas, rectangle brace behind)
Small size: back-mounting on dibond and with frame around.

There are 2 sizes:
Large size: the height is fixed at 170cm, the width varies from 210-270 cm; Edition of 5.
Small Size: the height is fixed at 80cm, the width varies from 100-150 cm; Edition of 8.


via Xing Danwen

Frederic Gmeiner, Torsten Posselt & Benjamin Maus + Libeskind


Jüdisches Museum, 2009
via Extracts of Local Distance

Pia Rönicke + Schindler



 

The Life of Schindler House, 2002

Heather Rowe + Rudolph






Heather Rowe:
On Returning
November 9 – December 23, 2007
Opening Reception: November 9, 6-8pm

D'Amelio Terras is pleased to present our second solo exhibition with Heather Rowe. She will exhibit On Returning, a single large-scale sculpture positioned between the two main gallery columns. This work continues Rowe’s exploration of architectural fragmentation, structural dysfunction, and material inversion. Countering the more conventional construction-like elements are strategically placed details, culled from a range of design styles and periods.

This installation takes a late modernist house designed by Paul Rudolph in 1972 as its point of departure. The Westport Connecticut dwelling was recently demolished to make way for a new construction. In Rowe’s incarnation of the design, the façade of the house is mirrored and the two resulting structures are inverted and placed at an angle. The outside walls face each other and the interior becomes exposed and unprotected. Remnants of a fictional domestic space (smashed window frame, tiled bathroom mirrors, a patterned curtain) are inserted within the sculpture and elevate it into a more personal and psychological realm. This illusionistic space is meant to be passed around and through allowing viewers to return to the same intersections and question their similarities and/or differences. Here, the architecture, its interior design and style become pronounced in a particular way where they become extensions of irrational attachments and neurosis.

“…on returning to a place which exists only in the mind. Either a place destroyed or a place once inhabited and then left. The mind brings about distorted ideas of the actual space-assigning scale and size in a more psychologically charged way, shaped by events that occurred there.” (from the artist)

Rowe is currently featured in 'Undone' at The Whitney Museum at Altria, New York. In 2007 she was included in Practical F/X, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, and Stubborn Materials, Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Her work has been exhibited at The Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Michael Zink Galerie, Munich; White Columns, New York; and Artists Space, New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University and lives and works in New York City.

The Artist would like to thank Nepal Asatthawasi at the Paul Rudolph
Foundation for her generous help with this project as well as Chris
Mottalini for his photographs of the Micheels House.

via D'Amelio Terras

Heather Rowe + Taut


Plans That Have Fallen Through
2006
glass, wood, flocked wallpaper, partial plan for Bruno Taut Glashaus (1914)
Table: 72 x 84 x 41 inches; Drawing: 72 x 72 inches
Courtesy of the artist and D’Amelio Terras, New York

Gail Pickering + the Smithsons


BRUTALIST PREMOLITION, 2008.

Media Art Bath is delighted to announce the exhibition of a new commission by Gail Pickering, BRUTALIST PREMOLITION featuring both film and performance.

The performance and film works of Gail Pickering are characterized by a layering of performative fictions, constructed and sourced through specific sites and historical or political events. Her recent video works explore ideas of highly authored forms of collaboration. Working with both amateur and professional actors, she devises scenarios or situations in which the discrepancy between individual and ‘role’ is emphasised and questioned.

BRUTALIST PREMOLITION takes as its starting point the snaking concrete housing estate Robin Hood Gardens, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, a key example of post-war New Brutalist architecture intended as a utopian form of large scale social housing. Pickering works from the interior of the architecture, producing a film from within one of the flats on the estate. The film shows a resident family casting professional actors to play themselves. Embedding familiar faces from British television and film, we see the actors repeating well-rehearsed scenes from their inventory of past roles. As the work progresses, the actors begin to occupy the flat where their theatricality and professionalism is played out alongside the participation of the family.

For its presentation at Arnolfini, Pickering will produce a special performance alongside the film, extending the works interests into the realm of a live event.

For more information and tickets please contact Bridget Crone or Lucy Sames on 01225 442 591, or email: info@mediaartbath.org.uk.

BRUTALIST PREMOLITION has been commissioned by Media Art Bath with support from the Henry Moore Foundation and is also included in a solo exhibition, as part of ‘Nought to Sixty' - 13-20 October 2008, Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London. www.ica.org.uk

Media Art Bath – championing contemporary art and ideas through the development of bold new work.

Pia Rönicke + Eames



Untitled Eames Model (2001) 1 min 36 seg.

Pia Rönicke + Mies van der Rohe



Outside the Living Room
Denmark, 2000 / 9:10 min (Computer Animation)
colour & sound

The Film
The film is an investigation of the garden, an attempt to reconcile nature with urbanism. Rönicke’s strange visions include Manhattan skyscrapers, surrounded by dense forest, and rice fields on top of Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments. The visions are as utopians of a restored balance between urbanism and nature. In the film, collage is used as a medium with images from popular culture. Rönicke also criticises modernism’s way of presupposing one particular way of living. In her pieces, Rönicke takes on the role of a kind of a poetic urban planner. By presenting her subjective utopias, she is on one hand revealing a possible future, and on the other, reflecting on their utopian character.
Text: Henrikke Nielse

Ra di Martino + Friedman



If You See the Object, the Object Sees You, HD Video 4’ (circa), 2010

Friday 18 February 2011

Sam Durant + Koenig


Abandoned House #1 (Case Study #22)  1995

Mixed media
object: 780 x 1080 x 810 mm
sculpture

The Case Study Houses were an experiment in residential architecture, designed by major architects to provide inexpensive and efficient model homes in response to the post-war American housing boom. Durant has made a series of scale replicas of the houses in states of disrepair. Case Study no.22, the Stahl House, was designed and built by Pierre Koenig in 1960 and has become a modernist icon. Durant’s model has holes knocked through the walls and is littered with debris, suggesting decline and degradation, and the failure of this utopian ideal.

via Tate Modern

Sam Durant, Abandoned Houses (Collages, Sculptures, Drawings)

Xing Danwen + Hejduk






Wall House
2007
an installation with 4 photographs & 1 animation video projection

Looking out the window is a view of a city - a large city, populated by people, buildings, cars and roads. In this scale and from this perspective, distance and time are no longer simple realities of everyday life. People commute from one place to another, passing within centimeters and seconds of each other. We can be so close but at the same time so far away from each other physically and emotionally. This is I picture big cities. As the material quality of life has improved, less intimacy remains; the more a city develops and expands, the further we are alienated from one another. Loneliness becomes a fact, which envelops our everyday life and feelings.


In Feb 2007, I was invited to participate in the Wall House Foundation Residency Program located in Northern Holland on the outskirts of Groninger. Wall House is one of the few actual realized architecture designed by John Hejduk. His name might not be well known, but he is a widely respected and influential architect whose conceptual and theoretical philosophy significantly impacted the field in the 1970s. Until Hejduk’s death in 2000, none of his projects had ever been realized. Wall House was built posthumously in 2001.


The central element in the Wall House is, as the name suggests, an 18 meter-wide and 14 meter-high wall. This wall horizontally cuts the house into two discreet spaces. On one side of the wall there is a three-storey residential space, which includes the living room, the kitchen adjoining dining room and bedroom. On the other side are the more technical spaces, such as the office, stairs, bathroom and toilet, and a corridor which is about 30 meter-long and 2 meter-wide. This long and narrow path vertically runs through the center of the house from the house entrance into the dinning room, which ends at The Wall.

It seems like a long bridge connecting these two spaces from two sides of The Wall.
Wall House’s unconventional floor plan reflects Hejduk’s interest in the tensions between public and private space within a dwelling. In the case of Wall House, the occupant always feels detached from what happens on the other side of the wall and, at the same time, that person will always have the feeling of being a stranger within the interior — essentially creating a sense of isolation on both sides of the wall. Inhabiting Wall House for two weeks on my own, I explored the theoretical concepts behind Hejduk’s work. As my focus shifted away from the architecture, I become inspired by the psychological experience of living in the house and created my own work, “Wall House”.


In “Wall House”, I use Hedjuk’s problematic physical space as a starting point and continue to explore themes of contemporary loneliness and detachment in urban life. I project the idea of emotion and physical displacement through the use of a solitary figure: “I” live alone without a choice and “I” am obligated to accept this loneliness. Confronted with this reality, I am searching for truth and an answer to the question, “how does one live alone?” I intend to raise awareness about living alone, where “you” are your only companion.


The interior spaces in these photographs were shot inside the actual Wall House. I am the subject in every photograph. The exterior cityscapes, seen through the windows, are images from cities in China. I hope to create a contrast between the vacant interior space and the dense city outside. This creates an invisible relationship between people who are linked by proximity but lack true interpersonal connections. Details and symbolic visuals were digitally inserted within the photographs by computer and include details from John Hedjuk’s original Wall House maquette.


This work is presented as an installation with 4 photographs, 1 animation video projection and white plaster walls. The plaster walls are set up as the division of jointed apartments next to each other.

The sizes of the 4 photographs are different. They are hung along the walls separately with different depth and perspective, which suggests the views into the rooms.

The animation video loop projects onto the image of an empty bedroom, which creates an illusionary layer over this emptiness. These two medias merge into each other, create a unique effect between the fact and illusion, which implicates the reversed relationship between the neighbors. The woman from the animation video supposes the owner of the empty bedroom (image 3), who is drawn from my act too.
The photo prints are photographic C-prints, DIASEC (back-mounted on aluminum, face-mounted with Plexi-glas, supported by rectangle braces behind).


The print sizes are:
image 1, 160 x120 cm / 63 x 47.25 inch; (WxH)
image 2, 100 x80 cm / 39.4 x31.5 inch; (WxH)
image 3, 130 x100 cm / 51.2 x 39.4 inch; (WxH)
image 4, 90 x 120 cm / 35.4 x 47.2 inch; (WxH)
The animation video is a 1-minute loop with sound in DVD format.


4 photographic C- prints + 1 DVD; Edition of 8

via Xing Danwen