In a city that often leaves little room to pause, a new institution is attempting something quietly radical. Ibraaz, unfolding across a six-storey, 10,000 sq ft Grade II-listed building, is conceived as more than a gallery or performance venue. It aims to be a site of gathering and imagination, where difficult questions are asked, new possibilities are rehearsed, and hospitality becomes a daily practice.

Founded by Lina Lazaar in 2011 as part of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Ibraaz began as an online platform sharing visual culture from the Middle East and North Africa. Its physical arrival marks a new chapter, rooted in a city Lazaar sees as central to the project’s ambitions. 'There is no more diasporic city in the world than London,' she says.

Hammad Nasar, director of programmes and content, frames the project as both ambitious and necessary. 'The idea of the Global Majority is not a fixed geography, nor a fixed typology,' he explains. 'It’s an aspiration and a possibility for connection.' This openness shapes Ibraaz’s ethos. Rather than presenting static exhibitions or rigid programmes, it evolves fluidly, with spaces and ideas, and audiences revealing themselves over time. Lazaar describes this as 'a cosmology of interest and of audiences'.

The building itself, reimagined by resident architect Sumayya Vally of Counterspace with support from James Bell of MSMR Architects, embodies that spirit. Across six floors, spaces named after African and Arab communal typologies reinforce Ibraaz’s emphasis on hospitality. At street level, the Maktaba (bookshop) and Oula café invite the city in. The Majlis assembly hall hosts exhibitions and conversations; Minassa on the lower ground floor stages screenings and performances; and Iqra, the library, offers a space for reflection and reading. 'We’re standing here in the middle of our café in residence,' says Nasar. 'Come in, feed your belly, feed your mind. And as you go up the building, feed your soul.'

Adds Vally: 'I love that the spaces at Ibraaz are themed around spaces in a home - kitchen, majlis, prayer room, library - for example; and that the infrastructures of these spaces are meant to host artists’ works that at their heart, are about hosting others. It makes the thinking in the institutional structure inherently architectural. I believe very much in fostering belonging in institutional spaces; and I believe that this happens through gently presenting works in formats that are familiar to our communities.  We are making offerings in each of our spaces with underlying logics of “home”, something I think is special and different as an institutional approach.'

The residency model is central to this vision. 'The concept of in-residence is something we really care about,' says Lazaar. 'It’s the idea that magic can happen when you relinquish power to people you trust and whose expertise and vision you want alongside you.'

That ethos runs through the opening programme. Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama transforms the Majlis with Parliament of Ghosts, an installation built from colonial-era furniture and jute sacks collected during the Covid period. ‘What interests me most is the question of repair: how do we bring things back to life, how do we excavate histories through material forms?' Mahama asks.

Elsewhere, The Otolith Group’s Library-in-Residence turns decades of research into a living archive of books, films, and maps. The Bookshop-in-Residence, curated by the Palestine Festival of Literature and operated by Burley Fisher Books, foregrounds critical global literature. Oula café, led by chef Boutheina Ben Salem, celebrates Tunisian culinary traditions and storytelling through food. Writer and cultural critic Shumon Basar, as curator-at-large for public programmes, shapes a discursive strand of talks and events, while curator Ibed Boujellab leads Ibraaz’s evolving music and sound programme.

For Lazaar, the point is to weave these threads into a larger journey. 'You’re not coming here for one piece of content,' she says. 'You’re trying to thread a journey that connects different geographies, across content and medium. We really want this to be an open institution, collaborating with like-minded organisations and creating enough porosities for others to join us.' Nasar adds that the in-residence model allows interactions to unfold cumulatively, deepening engagement over time.

In a city already rich with cultural institutions, Ibraaz’s proposition is to go where others cannot or will not, holding space for difficult, urgent conversations while nurturing generosity and care. 'We care for the space to be a gathering of gatherings,' says Lazaar. 'This idea of hospitality, we don’t say it lightly. It’s an inherent core value we want to embody.'

What begins this October as a bold experiment in convening, connecting, and collaborating gestures already beyond its walls. 'I’m excited for the moment when it’s no longer ours,' Lazaar reflects. 'It’s everyone else’s.' In that aspiration lies Ibraaz’s most ambitious promise: that through gathering, questioning, and imagining together, new cultural forms and new futures can emerge.

Ibraaz is located at 93 Mortimer Street, London W1W 7SS
Opening hours Wednesday to Sunday: 11am–6pm. Free admission

ibraaz.org

Milan is not a hard sell for the worlds of design and fashion, and while Italy’s industrial capital boasts a soaring tradition of art patronage and connoisseurship, its status as an art market hub has commonly fallen behind its peers, such as Paris and London. The tables are about to turn as the Italian government recently approved the reduction of tax on art sales from 22 per cent to five per cent. Italy is also enjoying a recent influx of British wealth following a recently passed law, which lets high-income individuals pay a flat levy of €200,000 to avoid Italian taxes on overseas income.

Timing could not be more perfect for art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, who has recently unveiled the newest addition to his mini gallery empire, in the heart of Milan. Located a stone’s throw from La Scala, Palazzo Belgioioso was a case of love at first sight for the opera-loving Austrian gallerist whose eponymous enterprise has locations in Paris, Salzburg, London, and Seoul. 'I always wanted an ultimate European gallery and without Italy, this would be unimaginable,' he tells Wallpaper*.

The individual character that typifies Ropac’s venues hints at his pickiness in architectural depth. 'They always have a certain edge to be special,' says the dealer, who admits he is 'not easy to satisfy' in settling on a potential gallery space. When he walked into this two-storey 280 sq m neoclassical beauty, however, Ropac was faced by its 'loaded' quality; it dates back to 1781, when architect Giuseppe Piermarini designed the marble palazzo for Prince Alberico XII di Belgioioso d’Este. An architectural marvel in its own right, the building had gone through a restoration phase in the early 1990s. For it's new life, the gallery commissioned local architect Umberto Dubini for little touches to bring it 'back to its glory.'

The aesthetic bones, however, do the talking. A suite of dramatic stuccos, which were created by 18th-century Swiss-Italian architect Giocondo Albertolli, crown the main exhibition space. The glorious depictions of coats of arms refer to the interior’s past as a library for nobles. The arresting features also include frescos by famed Australian-Italian painter Martin Knoller, which currently hover above the inaugural two-artist exhibition ‘L’aurora viene’, featuring works by Georg Baselitz and Lucio Fontana. The pairing of the German Neo-Expressionist painter and the Argentinian-born Italian maestro of Spatialist painting is the brainchild of the Milan gallery’s executive director Elena Bonanno di Linguaglossa. The gestural connection between two artists who never met in person energises the interior’s time-defying grandiosity, which oozes with mystery and intrigue.

Illuminated by interior designer Adrien Gardère’s elegant light fixtures are Baselitz’s signature upside-down human figures, such as the ash-hued Senza arrivo, Lucio è passato (2019), and Fontana’s oval-shaped canvas Concetto spaziale, Fine di Dio (1963-4) from his rarely exhibited titular series on mortality. 'Especially as a foreign gallery, we had to pay homage to Milan,' says Bonanno di Linguaglossa, who worked with Fondazione Lucio Fontana to secure substantial loans and rare archival imagery for the show’s catalogue.

Sculpture, particularly, has a penetrating presence in the space. Fontana’s glazed and painted terracotta humanoid form Arlecchino (1949) has a lingering effect in the company of Baselitz’s similarly spectral paintings of bodies trapped in infinite fall, such as the pink-hued Rosa riposa (2019). ‘We had to do a show that would reflect our DNA,’ says Ropac, who is beyond hopeful about the future of his newest outing, which is in fact the smallest venue in his roster. Up next is another two-artist show, dedicated to Valie Export and Ketty La Rocca, that should underscore the gallery’s potential for intriguing pairings .

‘Georg Baselitz and Lucio Fontana: L’aurora viene’ runs through 21 November 2025, ropac.net

The Frick Collection’s epic $220 million, five-year renovation was one of the art world’s biggest stories this spring. Now, the New York museum is making headlines again – this time by enlisting the talents of Steve Martin to mark and promote its grand reopening.

In a six-minute video – published on The Frick’s website and social media channels – the Only Murders in the Building actor takes viewers on a tour of the museum. As he moves through the Gilded Age mansion that houses the collections (which were temporarily relocated to the brutalist Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue during the renovation), Martin shares a brief history of The Frick Collection, which opened in 1935, and its founder, Henry Clay Frick. He highlights the museum’s reputation as one of the finest small collections of European fine and decorative arts in the US, showcasing everything from Old Master paintings to French furniture and Limoges enamel.

The actor encourages viewers to visit the Frick in person and experience its treasures slowly and reflectively. ‘This is what The Frick Collection is for,’ he says. ‘For slowing down, following your eye, and getting closer to objects of beauty and awe that are always right here, waiting for us behind these historic doors.’

If you, like us, are wondering, why Martin? – a Frick spokesperson has explained that the actor is a longtime member and fan of the museum, as well as an iconic New York figure. He’s also a serious art collector, having described collecting as his ‘biggest hobby’, and is reportedly the owner of works by Picasso, Francis Bacon and Roy Lichtenstein.

We’d like to think that his appearance is also a wink to his 2006 role as the museum-heist-investigating Inspector Jacques Clouseau in The Pink Panther – proving that even a bastion of classic art isn’t above a little playful irony.

Video credits: Video by SandenWolff. Writer: Rachel Wolff . Director: Jonathan Sanden. Photography: Noah Therrien, Jonathan Sanden, Nate Reininga, Thomas Lange. Editors: Hannah Kaylor, Jonathan Sanden. Music: Noah Therrien. Producers: Alexis Light, Katherine Ellis, Lisa Goble. Additional Footage: George Koelle. Editorial: Noah Purdy, Vincent Tolentino

When art galleries decide to broaden their horizons, they often open new outposts in one of the major art destinations, from New York to Paris or Hong Kong. For Gathering, a gallery founded in London in 2022 to platform the work of emerging artists and those with less conventionally commercial practices, the unconventional next step is Ibiza. Newly opened on the relaxed north side of the famous party island, Gathering Ibiza features a high-ceilinged gallery space with two mezzanine floors; an outdoor restaurant, Mira; and a bar designed by artist Tai Shani, complete with bright pink stools, blown-glass breast-shaped lights, and a marble-esque façade. 

‘Ibiza’s contemporary art scene is emerging, very much in line with Gathering as a gallery,’ says Alex Flick, the founder of the space. ‘The island has grown exponentially in the last 50 years, from secret hippie hotspot to clubbing destination to now a year-round home for creative people from across the world. Elements of all these incarnations of the island have remained to this day, and I love the beautiful mix of people it brings.’ 

Gathering Ibiza, ‘front and centre of a growing art scene‘

The inaugural exhibition, ‘Substance’, unites three artists who each harness the mercurial power of physical materials. The wall-hung works of Kristian Kragelund, Rannva Kunoy and Jennifer Tee morph and shift as viewers move around them. Tee’s intricate collages at first seem to be made from marbled cutouts of paper, but they are in fact painstakingly created from real tulip petals, with rich streaks of red, purple and yellow running down their lengths. From a distance, Kragelund’s abstract geometric works seem to be formed from hundreds of delicate threads. As the viewer moves closer, these are revealed to be sturdy panels of fibreglass, a famously tough material that is dangerous to human touch. Kunoy’s pigment and lacquer paintings have an oil-like sheen, their colours blending between purple, green and pearlescent white when viewed from different angles. 

These are each complex works, which make sculptural use of their materials. These materials are also woven through with symbolic and historical significance. Tee began working with tulip petals in 2017, bringing together her Dutch and Chinese Indonesian heritage by applying the iconic flower of her birth country to traditional textile designs from the Lampung region of southern Sumatra, Indonesia. These are often woven through with recurring motifs; ships, for example, represent both geographical travel and the journey from life to death.  

Kragelund’s work explores the subliminal violence that is embedded into the objects and structures within our everyday lives, often using industrial debris and the materials of commercial production. Kunoy similarly utilises an industrial material that signifies the opulence of late-capitalism, in her work with crystal enamel paint, which is typically employed for luxury car bodies. ‘It was an opportunity to work with three artists whom I greatly admire but are not part of our represented programme,’ says Flick. ‘They each liked the concept and the other artists, all of which are painters who don’t use a brush.’

The gallery will next be showing a dual exhibition of Bruce Nauman and Stefan Brüggemann – who has a bespoke home and studio building in Ibiza’s nearby hills – during CAN Art Fair. Haunted by a Million Suns, an illuminated candle sculpture by Tai Shani, will also be on permanent display outside the gallery, alongside her bar. ‘We are the first gallery from the UK and only the second gallery in general to have a space on the island,’ says Flick. ‘Being front and centre of a growing art scene is exciting for me, the gallery and, very importantly, the artists.’

‘Substance’, a group show featuring works by Kristian Kragelund, Rannva Kunoy and Jennifer Tee, is at Gathering Ibiza until 20 June 2024
gathering.london

Earlier this month (January 2024) Jack Shainman gave New York a sneak preview of its new gallery: a 20,000 sq ft space inside the landmark Clock Tower Building. 

Construction on the TriBeCa space won’t be completed until later in the year, but visitors can get a glimpse of the main exhibition hall where Broken Spectre, a new film by Irish artist Richard Mosse, is currently on display. For Shainman, it was important to open the gallery ahead of schedule to show the piece, which documents the mass deforestation of the Amazon from 2018-2022, when more than one-fifth of the original forest was destroyed. 

Switching between monochromatic and infrared film, Broken Spectre captures aerial views of eviscerated, smoke-filled forests; encounters with Indigenous communities; exquisite close-ups of flora and fauna; and disturbing documentation of people illegally deforesting the land. Shown on a 60ft-wide LED screen with a multi-channel sound field, the film creates a dream-like environment that is both breathtaking and terrifying. 

First look inside the new Jack Shainman Gallery

The impressiveness of the piece is heightened by the impressiveness of the new gallery, most of which is hidden behind black curtains and obscured by darkness for the film, but some of which – primarily the towering, cathedral-like walls and an Italian Renaissance Revival coffered ceiling – can be seen in fragments and felt in the expansive reverberation of sound. 

On opening night, Shainman took me upstairs for a glimpse of some of the in-progress areas of the gallery. What I saw was striking for its architectural beauty – it is, after all, an 1898 design by McKim, Mead & White – but even more so for its juxtaposition of, as Shainman tells me, ‘the contemporary with the historic’. Marble fireplaces and stucco wall decorations frame windows looking out onto lower Manhattan: its towering office blocks and monumental courthouses; the wide stretch of Lafayette leading down to Spring Street, and a never-ending throng of people moving below. 

It’s easy to see how this contrast will only be intensified by the presence of work by the artists Shainman represents, contemporary luminaries such as Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, Hank Willis Thomas, El Anatsui and other artists whose work examines the past and, in doing so, creates a new mirror for our present. 

The gallery has made a point of discussing the history of the building and the work it shows. The Clock Tower Building was originally the home of the New York Life Insurance Company and, as such, a poignant symbol of American capital and consumerism. ‘Ushering the American landmark into a contemporary context,’ Jack Shainman says in the opening release, ‘the gallery aspires to activate the space to platform essential ecological and Indigenous restitution.’

‘Part of the idea of being in a space like this,’ Shainman tells me, ‘is the idea of challenging the notion of how we're used to looking at art, of how art is presented.’ It’s an idea Shainman has already explored on a grand scale with The School, a 30,000-sq-ft former high school in Kinderhook, NY that he opened in 2013 to present large exhibitions from artists within and outside of his gallery roster. But this new location on 46 Lafayette is the first Jack Shainman gallery in New York City since the opening of the original in Chelsea in 1997; it’s also the space that will make Jack Shainman – like David Zwirner, Pace and Gagosian before it – a mega-gallery destination. 

Broken Spectre is on show from 12 January – 16 March 2024. The gallery will close and reopen fully in September 2024 with an expansive Nick Cave exhibition, featuring an entirely new body of work.

Jackshainman.com

Looping abstractions formed from spiralling modules of interconnected polyhedra. Circular drawings created by desert sun and winds. Dancing trajectories of water droplets caught in light while falling through darkness. According to the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, these works are threaded together by ideas of ‘deep time, slowness, motion and geometry’ – and they can now be viewed at Azabudai Hills Gallery, part of the major new district and cultural hub in the heart of Tokyo that opened this week (see our Azabudai Hills walkthrough with Thomas Heatherwick).

The culmination of three decades of planning, Azabudai Hills is inspired by the idea of a modern urban village, with three skyscrapers rising into the clouds, between which flows a green network of Heatherwick Studio-designed lower-level architecture and landscaping, housing offices, residences, shops, health clinics, a hotel and a school.

Azabudai Hills Gallery

Culture is a critical connector. Aiming to dissolve the boundaries between daily life and art to boost wellness, the so-called city-in-a-city, developed by Mori Building, is home to more than 9,000 sq m of art and museum spaces (Pace and teamLab’s Borderless will open here next year).

The cultural heartbeat is Azabudai Hills Gallery, a new contemporary art space, which opens with a solo exhibition by Eliasson, who has also created a public artwork for the complex.

Eliasson – an artist who has recreated the ephemeral beauty of rainbows, made the sun rise over London, built waterfalls in New York and put a riverbed in a gallery (much of which is covered in Olafur Eliasson: Experience, published by Phaidon) – has spent decades exploring the dynamic between humans and their environment, often through large-scale expressions of the elements of nature.

His new works at Azabudai Hills are no less layered. Looking upwards in the glass-fronted lobby of Mori JP Tower (at 330m, the tallest skyscraper in Japan), A harmonious cycle of interconnected nows hangs from a 15m-high ceiling, comprising a set of four intricately delicate spiralling forms, each spanning 3m in diameter.

The spirals, made from recycled zinc (a first for Eliasson) follow the dynamic trajectory of a single point to express the movement found in all things. A complex series of interconnected, polyhedron-shaped modules is threaded into loops, twists and curves, their multi-faceted surfaces gently reflecting the shifting sun outside.

Explaining the concept to Wallpaper*, Eliasson says: ‘The work was inspired by shifting scales: looking simultaneously at the macro level, where everything is in constant motion, and at the micro level, where everything consists of tiny building blocks.

‘These large-scale motions are all, to a certain extent, cycles, even if they take place at a pace or scale that is beyond anything we can visualise – our planet, the sun, the solar system travelling through space, the passing of the seasons, the water cycle and the rock cycle on Earth. What appears solid is actually in motion, ephemeral. At the same time, the world is made up of these elemental building blocks that exhibit a clarity or structure that is seemingly stable – crystals, molecules, and atomic structures.’

Olafur Eliasson, ‘A harmonious cycle of interconnected nows’

The same ideas – of time, cycles, the motion of lines – are explored in his exhibition at Azabudai Hills Gallery, also called ‘A harmonious cycle of interconnected nows’, curated by Mami Kataoka, director of Mori Art Museum, and Hirokazu Tokuyama, associate curator at Mori Art Museum: ‘The concept of this whole development is green and wellness,’ says Tokuyama. ‘Olafur was one of the first artists who committed to this subject. It’s very easy to sense this connection in the exhibition and permanent artwork.’

The show, which has 15 new artworks, opens with Firefly biosphere (falling magma star), a red glass ball sculpture containing intricately refracted light that moves across the surrounding walls. Visitors can also interact with a pendulum-powered drawing machine, The endless study, drop a pen onto paper, and watch intricate patterns take shape, the result of three axes and two frequencies in motion.

Paintings are brought to life in the desert of Qatar using the natural elements – three with deep, strong scorch marks forged through the sun-heated base of glass touching paper; another three with ethereally blurred edges evoked through the wind-moving brushes on canvas.

‘I have worked on drawing machines for many years, going back to experiments I created with my father while he was working as a cook on a boat,’ says Eliasson. ‘We were interested in enlisting the help of the elements to make drawings that we ourselves might not have made on our own. In that case, it was the motion of the waves and the sea. In the more recent drawing machines, produced earlier this year for an artwork in the desert of Qatar, I have made use of the light of the sun to burn paper, and the power of the wind to move pendulums that cause marks on canvases.’

He adds: ‘These are artworks made by the planet, by the motion of the Earth or by the weather patterns at the site. I wanted to draw a connection between these seemingly small works and the large forces behind them, just as the permanent installation connects the two scales of cyclical motion and falling, modular geometrical elements.’

The wind theme continues in The air we breathe, made from the same modules of polyhedra used in his permanent artwork – this time in a vertical form, with air-blowing fans at its apex.

Explaining the recycled material, he says: ‘The zinc is a by-product of waste incineration. It’s filtered out of the smoke that in the past would have simply mixed into our atmosphere as air pollution. It’s still a rather experimental process.’

He adds: ‘In a sense, I see the recycled zinc as reflecting the pollution that has been removed from the air we breathe. The fans at the top of this tower of modules put the air into motion.

‘I’ve used fans a number of times in my art, in fact, and I like that they create an experience that is not visually perceptible but has a definite presence in the space as wind. So the work has a certain dematerial aspect while also being very much about materials.’

Another highlight is Your split second house: an installation stretching more than 20m in a long dark space, where strobe lights catch the flickering trajectories of water droplets from three pipes attached to the ceiling – to hypnotic sensory effect, from the visual beauty of the water to the sound of it drumming the floor and the moisture lingering in the air.

The café’s mindful menu to go with the show

Tapping into Eliasson’s long-held interest in the dialogue between food and art, The Kitchen at Azabudai Hills Gallery Café, in collaboration with Studio Olafur Eliasson Kitchen, is also showcasing a special menu to accompany the exhibition, with buffet dishes ranging from sweet miso glazed cauliflower and beetroot soup to black bean rice balls.

‘The kitchen at my studio has long played an important role in my practice,’ says Eliasson. ‘I see the potential of a kind of mindful cooking and eating, where you recognise the interconnectedness of things: how the head of lettuce contains the energy of the sun, converted via photosynthesis into sustenance, for example.’

‘Olafur Eliasson Exhibition: A Cycle of Harmony of Interconnected Nows’ from Friday 24 2023 – Sunday 31 March 2024

azabudai-hills.com

The London art scene just got bigger. Albion Jeune, which opened its doors at 16-17 Little Portland Street in November 2023, is founded and directed by Lucca Hue-Williams. The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, ‘I Want to Believe’, by Danish multimedia artist Esben Weile Kjær, celebrates a unique exploration of performance, installation, and stained glass.

Spanning over 1,300 sq ft, the gallery is set to be a new creative platform for both renowned and up-and-coming artists. After the debut show, there will be an interior redesign of the space before the diverse programme – a consideration for Hue-Williams since the project’s beginnings – launches fully. Speaking with Wallpaper*, she reflects: ‘[…]Albion Jeune is set to offer a diverse exhibition programme featuring emerging artists from around the globe, embodying its commitment to fostering a truly global art world.’

For Hue-Williams, Esben Weile Kjær was a natural choice to be the first featured artist. ‘Due to his remarkable talent and performative energy, Esben is having a real moment currently.[...] Thematically, his work is perfect to inaugurate the next generation of Albion. Focusing on identity politics in the age of constantly evolving new media, Kjær’s performances, stained glass, and installations examine his generation’s construction of selfhood and the rise of popular culture and technology in determining one’s experience of community and authenticity.’

Esben Weile Kjær, ‘I Want to Believe’ is at Albion Jeune until 18 November 2023, albionjeune.com

Drift Museum, a vast new experiential exhibition space, is coming to Amsterdam, and is set to open in 2025, in Van Gendt Hallen, a renovated listed building. Art duo Drift, composed of Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, have collaborated with entrepreneur and owner of the building Eduard Zanen to create the museum. 

Architecture firm Braaksma & Roos is at the helm of the new space, which will contain Drift’s performative and large-scale artworks. Since the success of Drift’s 2018 solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, the pair have been keen to create their own space suited to the technologically advanced nature of their work – which spans hovering concrete blocks (Drifter, 2017) and flocking drones (Franchise Freedom saw hundreds of drones take flight over Miami, in 2017, and Rotterdam, in 2020).

‘The Drift Museum is the outcome of everything we have been working towards for the past 17 years,’ the duo say. ‘We hope it will be a place that generates wonder and emotional responses from our visitors and where they feel more connected to our planet and nature.’

The Van Gendt Hallen building is composed of five industrial halls in the centre of Amsterdam, originally designed by architect Dolf van Gendt in 1898. Says Zanen: ‘This listed building fortunately escaped demolition. I see it as my responsibility to preserve this building for the future and to use innovative restoration techniques to transform it into a future-proof, sustainable, and energy-neutral national monument. The Drift Museum, over 8,000 sq m, will be located in two of the halls. The other halls will house sports activities, restaurants, offices and start-ups that stand out in terms of sustainability. This will make it a place where art and technology will come together on over 25,000 sq m of floor space and where new forms of collaboration will emerge, such as this new museum with Drift.’ 

studiodrift.com

Marseille’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) has just received a facelift. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the institution – located in the affluent southern neighbourhood of Bonneveine – underwent a four-year refurbishment. As a result, it now boasts a brand-new reception hall, a rooftop terrace and a new exhibition space. 

The reinvented museum – whose new artistic director Stéphanie Airaud is due to stem in this summer – opened with a bang last night with a temporary exhibition by Italian artist Paola Pivi and a rehang of its impressive collection featuring works by Louise Bourgeois, Zineb Sedira and Niki de Saint Phalle. But the celebration was tainted by ongoing social turmoil linked to President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform.

Designed in the late 1970s by the German physician Gustav Rau with views to house his private collection, MAC’s building was subsequently donated to the City of Marseille which opened its doors to the public in 1994 before obtaining museum status in 2003. Its modernist building is characterised by an imposing saw-tooth roof which graces its 2,500 sqm of marble-floored exhibition space with abundant sunlight. 

Now, thanks to a €5 million refurbishing project spearheaded by local architecture firm Bureau Architecture Méditerranée (BAM), the museum boasts an uncluttered entrance hall open to the street and over 300 sq m of additional exhibition space dedicated to experimental projects. Outside, a ramp now also links the entrance courtyard to the Bonneveine garden at the rear of the building and to a brand-new rooftop terrace with an aluminium bar and panoramic views of the surrounding eight arrondissements.

Inside, a newly-conceived hang gives an overview of the museum’s impressive collection which features some 600 works spanning twentieth-century movements such as Art Povera, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus and Supports-Surfaces. Inspired by Italian critic and artist Germano Celant’s seminal essay ‘1968: Towards a Global diversity’, the new display titled 'PARADE' features 130 works divided into six sections exploring such themes as materiality, subjectivity and fiction. 

Some masterpieces would certainly earn the envy of other museums. Among them, Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco’s iconic 1993 sculpture La DS – a modified Citroën DS conceived to fit only one body; Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1985 painting The King of Zulus – an homage to Louis Armstrong made of acrylic, oil pastels and glued photocopies on canvas, purchased by MAC in 1986 for the modest sum of 30,000 French francs (approximately 8,500 € today); and French artist Annette Messager’s 1984 Couteau Baiser – an enlarged photograph of a passionate kiss retouched with bright monochromatic acrylic colours and mounted on canvas. 

Alongside this, a temporary exhibition by Paola Pivi titled ‘It’s not my job, it’s your job’ features her ever-so Instagrammable multi-coloured feathered bears, among other large-size interactive works. 

For Marseille – France’s third largest city historically burdened by high rates of criminality and unemployment – MAC’s reopening is a symbol of its recently-elected socialist mayor Benoît Payan’s culturally-progressive international vision, one which contrasts with his centre-right clientelist predecessor of 25 years Jean-Claude Gaudin. But on the evening of the launch, the city’s enthusiasm was overshadowed by the stark reality of nationwide social turmoil over pension reforms when a group of some 40 protestors stormed the podium chanting ‘Macron démission!’ (‘Macron resign!’) and brandishing banners reading ‘No to the privatisation of the art world!’ The intervention served as a harsh reminder that a revitalised museum alone can’t save Marseille from its complex urban ills. 

Paola Pivi, 'It’s not my job, it’s your job', 6 August 2023, MAC, Musée d’art contemporain, 69, avenue d’Haïfa, 13008 Marseille. macm.org

Founded by New York-born artist-photographer Roger Ballen, the Inside Out Centre for the Arts is set to become a significant landmark on bustling Jan Smuts Avenue in leafy Johannesburg (or Jozi as locals call it). Its mission is simple: exhibit, educate and promote art related to the African continent.

A project years in the making, and a boon for Jozi’s Forest Town neighbourhood, Inside Out Centre for the Arts is specifically settled near the historical Constitutional Hill and the energetic creative suburb of Rosebank. Together with the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Museum and the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation, it forms part of a trinity of cultural and educational centres right in the hub of the city. 

The inaugural show, titled ‘End of the Game,’ will run for a minimum of one year. It grapples with the decimation of wildlife in Africa, specifically starting in the mid-1800s, through both a historical and artistic lens. Roger Ballen uses his work to delve deeper into the psychological relationship humans have with the natural world. In most cases, this relationship is ‘adversarial, exploitative and destructive, and is reflective of a dystopian world in ecological crisis’, says Ballen. 

And the show reveals exactly that. The introspective exhibition encompasses a cumulation of artefacts, paintings, drawings, film clips and documentary photographs. ‘This exhibition encourages vital discussions about our treatment of animals, wildlife management, responsible tourism and environmental stewardship in our current world,’ says Ballen, explaining that the show ‘attempts to record and highlight the historical significance and context of the “Golden Age’’ of African hunting expeditions by colonialists and powerful Western figureheads – such as Winston Churchill, FD Roosevelt, King Edward VIII and Ernest Hemingway.’

‘A central challenge in my career has been to locate the animal in the human being and the human being in the animal,’ says Ballen. ‘The rooms that I photograph represent the conflictual relationship between civilisation and nature, where opposites attract and break apart in a world built not on logic, but on irrationality. Delirium, mirage, dreams and nightmares coexist and cannot be categorized as light or dark.

‘Animals pervade my spaces: cats, dogs, rats, chickens, snakes and more. Dead and alive, big and small, wild and tame. Wherever you look, there are animals,’ he continues. ‘They appear in places that hardly belong. You cannot escape the animal. You cannot run away from the animal. The animal is deep inside. We come from the animal.’

The Inside Out Centre for the Arts was founded as a not-for-profit in 2008 – the new space is the physical manifestation of the foundation. The brutalist-inspired design of the building itself is based on the introspective idea of inside out. ‘I sometimes think that the building looks like it has been turned “inside out”,’ says Ballen, who worked closely with local architect Joe van Rooyen of JVR Architects to create this landmark building. Their vision was to give it both presence and personality – using raw concrete and plasterwork in both the interior and exterior surfaces that are seemingly intermingled. 

This approach functions as a way to create drama by concealing the entrance. Once through the threshold it is the main exhibition space that opens up into a double-volume naturally lit space with a dazzling suspended barrel. The offices on the other hand are off to the side in a theatrical cantilevered space. 

The centre will also facilitate a dynamic programme of educational talks, panel discussions, masterclasses and presentations that reflect on the current exhibition and on topics relevant to arts and culture. 

insideoutcentreforthearts.com

The National Portrait Gallery in London has revealed its new brand identity and full 2023-2024 programming information ahead of its grand reopening on 22 June 2023. 

The gallery, which has been closed to visitors since March 2020, worked with creative designers Edit Brand Studio, and brand strategists Boardroom Consulting to conceive the new vision for the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), which aims to better capture the gallery’s role in narrating Britain’s past, present and future through portraiture. 

The design draws on motifs from the reimagining of the Grade I-listed building, which is being transformed and reconfigured by Jamie Fobert Architects as part of the Inspiring People project. 

‘As we draw closer to our reopening on 22 June and revealing our complete transformation, this is the perfect time to launch our new brand,’ comments Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery. ‘Building on the concept of our architectural renovation, which is to reveal and celebrate our history while creating a gallery fit for 21st-century audiences, our new brand reflects our rich heritage but reimagined to be more relevant to more people in 2023 and beyond.’

The new identity debuts a new monogram, logotype, typeface and sleek colour palette, inspired by paint and materials in the building and archive, as well as the gallery’s own portrait collection. The new logo, which sees the initials ‘NPG’ entwined, draws on an original sketch by the gallery’s first director, Sir George Scharf, who entwined and encircled ‘NPG’ in a workbook, dated 1893.

The symbol has now been reimagined for the gallery by illustrator and typographer, Peter Horridge, best known for his logos and crests created for some of Britain’s leading institutions, from Liverpool Football Club to Liberty’s department store.

A contemporary new typeface that’s part of the brand identity, NPG Serif, was created by type foundry Monotype and is rooted in historic font references found throughout the gallery.

‘When we started working with the National Portrait Gallery, we quickly understood the requirement to create a brand for so much more than a gallery,’ said Karen Hughes, creative director of Edit Brand Studio. ‘We were creating a brand for a shop, a new café, a fine dining restaurant, a learning centre, family activities and even a night out. Putting the vast, magnificent and diverse Collection front and centre, we’ve therefore created a brand that can flex and mean lots of different things to lots of different people, whilst still feeling part of a strong, distinctive, unified whole.’

Explore the National Portrait Gallery 2023-2024 exhibition programme

Coinciding with the new brand identity launch, the National Portrait Gallery has unveiled its programming information from 2023-2024, including trailblazing female photography, new work by David Hockney, and an exhibition reframing the Black figure in art. 

Yevonde: Life and Colour
22 June – 15 October 2023

Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm
28 June – 1 October 2023

David Hockney: Drawing from Life
2 November 2023 – 21 January 2024

Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize 2023
9 November 2023 – 25 February 2024

The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure
22 February – 19 May 2024

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In
21 March – 30 June 2024

npg.org.uk

Soho and the contemporary art world go way back. This centuries-old breeding ground for radical art has been responsible for cultivating the careers of many a canon-steering artist. But even now, when a new gallery moves in, it’s big news. 

Enter Gathering, a new two-floor gallery space on Warwick Street founded by Alex Flick and Trinidad Fombella. Opening in time for Frieze Week 2022, Turner Prize winner Tai Shani inaugurates the space with ‘Your Arms Outstretched Above Your Head, Coding With The Angels’ – an ethereal, psychedelic show exploring power structures and political ideology. 

Flick and Fombella’s vision for the Gathering is a fusion of contemporary international art and social activism, particularly artists focusing on gender, race, queer culture, colonialism, the environment, inequality and marginalisation. 

Wallpaper*: When and how did the idea for Gathering come about? 

Trinidad Fombella: The idea for Gathering had been in the works for a long time, but we started working on it full-time last year. After two years of isolation, of exhibitions being cancelled and feeling as though life had been postponed, we decided it was time to build a place where we could come together physically and intellectually.

Alex Flick: We wanted to create a new, inclusive platform where we could showcase a diverse programme of site-specific exhibitions focusing on our shared passion for immersive installations and radical practices by international artists.

Wallpaper*: Can you describe the vision for the gallery and the artists you hope to work with? 

AF: Our vision for Gathering is guided by our deep interest in showcasing unique artistic voices, and fostering cultural exchange, dialogue and social interventions. To open our gallery with a solo exhibition by Tai Shani is incredibly exciting, her multi-disciplinary practice could not be more relevant, both to our vision and to today’s cultural climate.   

TF: Our guiding principle is that the work we show be innovative, exciting, and artistically and intellectually relevant. We are particularly interested in radical, experimental and multidisciplinary artists. Tai has been making work in this realm for nearly two decades, but her exhibitions have mostly lived within institutional frameworks. She is known for large-scale installations, and constellations of enigmatic works that make poetic environments which are politically charged and actively address power structures. 

Wallpaper*: Why was it so important to anchor the gallery in social activism (the Gallery Climate Coalition, Embode and The Anti-Slavery Collective) from the outset? And how will this inform your programming? 

TF: The environment is an issue that we care about deeply. Gallery Climate Coalition is a brilliant initiative that really creates awareness about how even the smallest changes you can make as a company have a larger impact. We also see it as a blueprint for how the art world can band together for causes that are important to humanity. 

AF: From the outset we wanted Gathering’s ethos to encompass issues that are very close to our hearts. We see our work with both Embode and The Anti-Slavery Collective as opportunities to highlight their important work and to collaborate with exceptional people. We are currently developing a campaign of limited-edition graphic T-shirts coinciding with each exhibition, designed by the artists we will show. All proceeds of the sales will be going to our initiative with Embode. 

Wallpaper*: Why did you choose Tai Shani for the inaugural exhibition? 

TF: Tai Shani is an artist we have long admired for her contributions to contemporary art discourse and beyond. Her work and social activism are complex and fearless, and her values and ideas are clearly defined in her multi-disciplinary practice and in all aspects of her life and work. A former teacher at the Royal College of Art and joint 2019 Turner Prize winner, Tai is extremely well respected and admired in the art community. 

AF: To open our gallery in London, the place we call home, with a British artist of her calibre, who has a strong social commitment and who has never had a commercial exhibition in the city before, expresses our vision in every possible way. Tai’s practice revolves around experimental texts, fantastical images and sculptural works in which she re-imagines feminine otherness, building a world of cosmologies, myths and histories that confront established narratives which need to be challenged. An immersive other-worldly installation will be taking over our lower gallery floor and it will only be reachable through a screening of Tai’s nine-chapter film The Neon Hieroglyph. A must-see experience for those who can make it to London this autumn.

Wallpaper*: Can you describe the architectural approach for the space, and why you chose Matheson Whiteley for the design?

AF: We wanted a space to mirror the challenging and ambitious programme we have planned. We are always looking to collaborate with people who can understand our vision and complement it. Matheson Whiteley have an incredible reputation with great projects under their belts, such as Studio Voltaire and Thomas Dane Gallery. 

TF: Jason Whiteley and James Bailey have inspired us with ideas that have shaped a unique architecture with raw, overlapping spaces and carefully designed suspended lighting structures. The existing space was stripped-out and renovated throughout, exposing the structural frame and revealing fragments of older walls and structural systems which have such a strong character.

INFORMATION

Tai Shani, ‘Your Arms Outstretched Above Your Head, Coding With The Angels’, Gathering, London, 6 October – 6 December 2022. gathering.london

The show ‘The Age/L’Età’ is the culmination of Emma Talbot’s six-month residency in Italy, facilitated by Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, after she was awarded the eighth Max Mara Art Prize for Women, in 2020. 

Presented first at Whitechapel Gallery in London before travelling to Collezione Maramotti in October, her exploration delves into the violence of Greek mythology and the balance of permaculture and paganism. Her work leads us to question the ‘role of destruction in the foundations of patriarchy’, explains curator Laura Smith. During her Italian residency, Talbot used knitted sculptures, animations from drawings, huge silk-screen paintings and disorientating soundwork to imagine a world anchored in nature’s wisdom.

Gustav Klimt’s The Three Ages of Woman, 1905, was the springboard for Talbot’s show. The painting, displayed in 1911 during Rome’s International Exhibition, organised to mark the 50th anniversary of Italian unification (Risorgimento), signifies the progression from tradition to modernity, and the birth of a united state. Able to observe the painting first-hand during her residency, Talbot imagined the elderly woman as emblematic of an old and ‘tired’ Italy. In response, she reframes the character as a saviour in a post-apocalyptic pagan dystopia, rooting her actions in the 12 permaculture design principles and a pagan respect for nature. 

At first glance, the show seems overtly feminist and uncomfortable. The loud, humming sounds offer a sense of unease and the images seem complicated – but what else could be expected from such a wide-ranging practice? A little time spent reading about the context of the exhibition sets the scene for Talbot’s imagined world, and is worth the extra moments of effort. It’s a rare treat to dive, layer by layer, into such depth of thought.

In Ruins and Volcanic Landscape, split across two silk screens, we follow the woman ‘trying to navigate the landscape of broken history’, as Smith explains. The tapestries hanging from the ceiling of Whitechapel Gallery contrast the serene with the brutal, depicting the woman in different forms; she nurtures hurt animals, is a 12-limbed figure busily twisted over swirling backgrounds and peers into cracks in her universe. The tone in the bubbles of speech dotted across the images range from advice that ‘life is a transformative process, keep going, learn and adapt’ to vehemently urging us to ‘use (our) agitations to rise up and survive’. The pieces portray the woman questioning the way of the world, presenting an amalgamation of thoughts that relate us in common moments of meditation. 

The facelessness of the woman is important; It enables the character to represent a universal ‘self’ and encourages understanding. In the 25-minute-long animation, The Trials, we see the elderly woman’s response to the mythical Twelve Labours of Hercules. Smith explains that Talbot doesn’t bind herself to conversations around womanhood, touching on ‘epic themes around feminism, age positivity and climate catastrophe’. Rather, she speculates on an alternative story of strength in which matriarchal wisdom prevails over violence. The charmingly awkward stop-start video depicts the woman redirecting power from The Lernean Hydra to more productive means, building trust with and calming The Nemean Lion and coexisting peacefully with The Cretan Bull. She uses patience and empathy to solve problems that Hercules famously blundered through with violence. She draws dystopian parallels between myths and modern-day problems, in turn questioning our role in change. The animations are also sprinkled with text, disjointedly narrating the story in questions such as ‘do you roar, is your rage suppressed?’ and reminding us that ‘your power comes from within’.

Across her media, Talbot offers finely orchestrated concepts, which nudge gently into one another and will us to question truths about contemporary Western society. The show’s title work, The Age/L’Età, stands proudly in the centre of the room, the elderly woman in full form. Her skin is made from recycled fibres and appears like a muscular armour, her long silver hair frames dark, sparkling eyes which reflect into the portal in front of her. Talbot refers to her sculptures as ‘3D drawings’, they project a dream-like foreign reality, and along with the overwhelming and indistinct sound played throughout the room, the show is disordered, which allows exploration between the works and lets you jump in at any point to piece it all together. 

Overarchingly, ‘The Age/L’Età' is a reminder to reflect. Here, we can ponder Talbot’s fabricated universe, question our internal compass, find solace in resolution and consider ‘how will you survive in this climate?’

Information

Until 4 September 2022 at Whitechapel Gallery, whitechapelgallery.org

‘The Age/L’Età’, Max Mara Art Prize for Women: Emma Talbot, Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy, 23 October 2022 – 19 February 2023

A post shared by writer and curator Ekow Eshun on Instagram reads ‘There Are Black People In The Future’ in a bold white font against an image of outer space in its all-encompassing blackness. It’s an open invitation to a series of events and happenings Eshun is curating at London’s Southbank Centre until September 2022, titled ‘In the Black Fantastic’. 

At the centre of the summertime spectacle is an exhibition at Hayward Gallery, opening in conjunction with the release of his new book of the same title. From a ‘Soundsuit’, created by artist Nick Cave in response to the public killing of George Floyd by the US police to a stop-motion animation film by Kara Walker based on acts of racial violence, the show is an eclectic amalgamation of beautiful yet deeply unsettling works. Though at first glance the aforementioned digital proclamation of Black futurity appears to be solely future-facing, when examined in conjunction with the works included in the exhibition, it is inextricably bound to the archive

Historically, the Western archive has acted as a site of presence and absence, particularly in regards to Black culture which has been obscured, and in certain cases erased from it. ‘In the Black Fantastic’ takes up space in this arena, showcasing artists whose works draw from various Black pasts, presents and speculative futures, fashioning alternative realities while probing at the construct of whiteness. 

On the eve of his book release, I had the opportunity to discuss the upcoming exhibition with Eshun. He spoke fervidly about the themes and ideas that underpinned the show, describing the exhibited works as attempts to ‘summon into being new propositions and possibilities of Black self-hood, space occupation and imagination’. Here lies the power of the Fantastic. 

In an extract from Adriano Elia’s essay ‘Old Slavery Seen Through Modern Eyes’, included in Eshun’s book, Elia constructs fantasy as a sphere that does not remove us from reality but instead allows us to excavate and uncover it. In this realm, we can deconstruct centuries of socially assigned personhood and construct meaning from what remains. This understanding of fantasy echoes through many of the selected works in the exhibition, which Eshun describes as emerging from that endpoint. ‘Most of these works begin on an awareness of the ideal of Blackness itself as a social fiction rather than a scientifical, biological reality, but they also take up for Blackness as a lived reality’, he says.‘The works aim to position Black life as a set of possibilities rather than an interrogation into a lived condition predicated on some of the historical structures that have been applied to definitions of Blackness in the past.’

Included in the exhibition is a selection of films created for art spaces rather than commercial release, which Eshun says eschews ‘demands in terms of meeting an audience’. ‘One of the capacities of film is its ability to expand the possibilities and spectacular strangeness of Black existence by taking us into other realms. In a way, artists often give themselves more of a licence to explore their personal areas of interest.’ The films span a range of ideas, pulling from conventional histories, folklore, myth, spiritual traditions, pageantry and the legacies of Afrofuturism, to create a new sphere, boldly labelled by Eshun as ‘The Black Fantastic’. In addition to these films are paintings, sculptures and installations by Chris Ofili, Sedrick Chisom, Ellen Gallagher, Hew Locke, Rashaad Newsome, Tabita Rezaire, Cauleen Smith and Lina Iris Viktor that all fall under Eshun’s conception of ‘The Black Fantastic’.

There is a placidity to Western accounts of history, as it pertains to Blackness, largely because our global system actively chooses to leave non-Western narratives unexamined. These works, if approached with a certain openness, may trigger internal investigations into how Western megalomania in the form of global homogenisation keeps us from ancient discoveries, counter-histories and futures proposed by cultures from the ‘global south’. They could push us to acknowledge that by conforming to Western narratives we are actively complicit in what can only be described as an attrition of the archive. 

INFORMATION

‘In the Black Fantastic’ is at Hayward Gallery until 18 September 2022, and will then be displayed at Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands, from November 2022 to March 2023

Elisha Tawe is an audiovisual artist, co-founder of the creative duo gray417c, and Black Culture Editor at Trippin Magazine. He is currently based in London

Over the last decade, Tokyo-based techno-creative collective teamLab has proved the crowd-pleasing (albeit not always critic-pleasing) potential of the ‘immersive’, interactive art (is it strictly art?) installation. 

Established by Toshiyuki Inoko in 2001, the collective gained an international reputation when Takashi Murakami showed its work at his Taipei gallery in 2011. Since then, teamLab has created spectacle and wonder – often involving light and lasers or interactive digital simulacra of the natural world and the apparent dissolution of physical space – pretty much everywhere. It now has permanent exhibition spaces in Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore and Macau with more to follow. (Tokyo’s teamLab Borderless opened in 2018 and attracted 2.3 million visitors in its first year, making it the most popular single-artist museum in the world.)

Of course, teamLab is no longer the only player in the immersive installation space. Other artists, designers, galleries, and cultural institutions have noted that pulling power. (Signed by Pace gallery in 2014, teamLab also pioneered a new economic model for artists and art collectives. Much to Pace’s initial scepticism, teamLab insisted on charging for tickets to its 2017 exhibition at a pop-up Menlo Park space, a former Tesla showroom, in Silicon Valley. Charging for admission is what museums, not private galleries do. But teamLab’s work is not private-collector friendly so, it argued, ticketing was the only way to fund the works. The show proved a huge success and revenue generator. Pace, in turn, launched Superblue, its dedicated experiential art division in 2020 with a permanent space, for ticketed shows, in Miami and a new outpost set to open in Kyoto).

The trick for teamLab – now an almost 700-strong super studio or ‘art stack’ – is maintaining some kind of creative distance from other digital art makers. Its collaboration on a new production of Puccini's Turandot, at Geneva's Grand Theatre 24 June – 3 July 2022, is evidence of that creative stretch. 

The production is directed by Daniel Kramer, former artistic director of the English National Opera, and known for his radical updates of opera's canonical texts, including a collaboration with Anish Kapoor on a production of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (and a hugely ambitious, non-canonical and financially catastrophic version of King Kong). 

Kramer’s new Turandot is similarly iconoclastic. The story of a prized princess testing a stream of suitors is reimagined as a dystopian game show (for the record, the production has been in the works for four years, plotted before Squid Game made dystopian game shows a thing. It is, though, similarly gruesome. One of Kramer’s innovations is that ‘contestants’ who fail Turandot’s tests are not beheaded, as is their traditional fate, but well and truly emasculated).

Kramer met up with Inoko in 2017 to talk about how he might incorporate teamLab’s light and lasers into a new work before signing them up to work on Turandot. Adam Booth, the collective’s art director on the project, admits that it has involved a certain amount of creative negotiation. ‘He came to see us in Tokyo and there was some intense brainstorming, working out how we could participate and keep our own aesthetics and integrity. Daniel had his ideas and we had ours and we worked through that. It was a long process.’ And got longer. Given that productions of Turandot usually feature a 100-strong chorus on stage, a Covid-safe outing was out of the question. 

Despite the game show conceit, Booth insists teamLab was not enlisted to provide an easy spectacle. ‘When you say lasers, most people think of light shows and green beams but it’s not about that for us. We’re trying to make planes of light and three-dimensional shapes by overlapping different planes and creating moiré effects when the lights cross. It’s not a pop concert, we’re using them to express something very subtle and delicate.’

The Covid hiatus gave Booth and his team time to work out how they could create a fluid architecture, unbounded by the proscenium arch, in lights and lasers. The studio’s in-house architecture team, teamLab Architects, meanwhile, were drafted to work on scenography, creating a stark, rotating multi-level structure, the gender power hierarchy at work in the play – with Princess Turandot very much on top – made physical. Booth and his team use mirrors and LEDs inside the set to create an intense kaleidoscopic take on the unfolding psychic drama. 

They also worked with the legendary costume designer Kimie Nakano. ‘Daniel is this amazing, energetic character and he wants everybody on board with everything. And it created this really interesting mix,’ Booth says.

The Grand Theatre is also planning to screen the production for free, live in Geneva’s Parc des Eaux-Vives. Though he admires the democratising impulse, Booth says a lot of the power of teamLab’s work will be lost in translation. ‘Lasers are just not suited to being filmed.’

For all the high-tech wizardry involved, what teamLab does is meant to be experienced physically, in person, and preferably collectively. It’s a point picked up by the collective’s project manager Kazumasa Nonaka.

Nonaka is behind another, unrelated, Geneva outing for the collective. Opened earlier this month at Pace’s outpost in the city, ‘Existence in an Infinite Continuity’ is another series of installation pieces involving moving digital forms. These new works, though, have a rare, raw spareness. A number of works called Dissipative Figures use minute lines to map the movement of air around human bodies and birds in motion. They are simple but mesmeric and hauntingly beautiful renderings of the disturbed, energised air we leave in our wake. 

‘As an expression, it’s very quiet but what’s happening is very dynamic; you see lines almost exploding as the figures run or walk,’  Nonaka says. ‘We are known for these very saturated and dynamic colours but just the difference in thickness and direction of these black and grey lines was enough to show the three-dimensionality of the air that moves around the human body.’ And if they feel a little sketchy, in a good way, that’s because they are just the first take on what Nonaka says will be on an ongoing series. 

Clearly, technology has advanced remarkably in the 20 years since teamLab was founded, or even over the last decade, when it has been a real international force. But Nonaka says that technology has only really helped speed up the collective’s creative and production process rather than effect any fundamental changes in the nature of its work. Advances in sensor technology have changed the degree to which its installations can be interactive (‘Existence in Infinite Continuity’ is also rare in that it is not interactive) and for how many people at the same time. 

As for all artists and galleries, pandemic-induced shutdowns forced teamLab to look at how it might put work out on social media and digital platforms such as YouTube. The collective created a ‘participatory’ piece, Flowers Bombing Home, for YouTube but Nonaka admits it wasn’t hugely successful. And, he says, teamLab is taking a cautious wait-and-see approach to AR/VR and the metaverse. ‘We still believe in physical interaction in physical space.’

INFORMATION

teamlab.art
Turandot is at Grand Théâtre de Genève, 20 June - 3 July gtg.ch
Existence in an Infinite Continuity is at Pace Gallery, Geneva until 2 July pacegallery.com

Tate Britain is hosting an expansive survey of more than 90 works by legendary British artist Cornelia Parker, spanning from the 1980s – 2022. On view until 16 October 2022, the show debuts new video and sculptural works Flag, 2022, and Island, 2022, which are staged alongside some of the artist’s most recognisable sculptures and installations. 

The wall text accompanying each piece is sprinkled with Parker’s first-person reflections, providing insight into the story and context behind each work. In her narration, we see Parker draw alternative meanings from the ordinary. Prison Wall Abstract (A Man Escaped), 2012 – 13 brings us through a daily walk, where Parker extracts art from the everyday in prison-wall cracks, and her News at… 2017 series, which sees children scrawl newspaper headlines of ‘Theresa Maybe’ and ‘Trump Spreading Social Poison’ on chalkboards.

Parker sees art in the underside of things. She highlights awkward objects and ugly mishaps, transforming them into abstract images of colourfully taped backs of signs and pools of spilt milk on the pavement. In Black Path (Bunhill Fields), 2013, she takes a bronze cast of the gaps between paving stones and elevates it inches above the ground, creating a striking structure. Familiar shadows are cast on the floor below the hovering hopscotch, creating an emblem devoid of function. 

Stolen Thunder, 1997 – 98 introduces us to Parker’s more satirical side. Presenting cloth bearing the tarnish from Henry VIII’s armour, Charles Dickens’ teaspoon and Guy Fawkes’ lantern, she realises the phrase ‘tarnished reputations’, ‘stealing their thunder and their fame’.

Elsewhere, she animates stacks of newspapers and exposes brash headlines gathered during the campaign period for Britain’s 2017 General Election. In Left, Right and Centre, 2017, newspapers blow around the House of Commons chamber at the hands of an artificially generated wind, evoking the turbulence and clashes so often associated with the space. In Perpetual Canon, 2004, Parker’s ‘mute marching band’ arrives in the form of a ring of flattened brass instruments, morphing the musical into a visual performance of shadows on walls, with no chance of sound.

A disjointed theme runs through the gallery and into the video spaces, where dream-like images of American revellers on Halloween are displayed alongside footage of Trump supporters ‘chanting like extras in a horror movie’, a blatant comment on a polarised America. Sound also plays a role in this hazy atmosphere in a new work, Flag, 2022, where Parker reverses footage of a Union Jack’s production accompanied by a humdrum hymn. The film visualises a ritualistic undoing of the patriotic monument, separating colours and unstitching strips of red, white and blue. 

Parker’s sometimes tongue-in-cheek approach to violence is demonstrated in her comic book-esque imagining of an explosion frozen in time. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991, allows the destruction of a shed to be inspected. The static light in the centre of the artwork sustains the brutality of the act, a reminder of the border between violence and reflection that this work sits on.

The final room, Island, 2022 – created especially for this exhibition – offers a similarly quiet moment. The work reflects on politics – specifically Brexit – and borders, beckoning us to heed the warning that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. The greenhouse is marked patriotically with paint made from the chalk of the White Cliffs of Dover, and the floor comprises reclaimed tiles from the hallways of Westminster Palace. Parker leaves the symbolism of the glass, chalk-lined borders and foundation of historic, well-trodden tiles (previously destined for the tip) for us to interpret from any angle.

Her fundamental comment, seemingly, is on the fragility of our island.

Merging nature, art and architecture, Valley Gallery, the latest build by Tadao Ando on Naoshima, is the Pritzker Prize-winning architect’s most conceptual design to date. It marks 30 years since his first building on the island, the Benesse House Museum, which was Naoshima’s first art museum, as well as a hotel. Nestled in the base of a deep valley, the new gallery is a modest structure with an angular steel roof and a trapezoidal floor plan informed by the landscape. Ando aimed ‘to create an independent architectural space while preserving as much of the existing topography and trees as possible’, in order to make the most of the site’s potential.

Covering a total floor area of 96 sq m, Valley Gallery consists of a white-walled room within an external concrete shell. Both are housed under an angular 12mm steel-plate roof reminiscent of origami folds, and accentuated by two corner openings at 30 degrees, framing the outside sky and revealing seasonal changes – wind, rain, sunshine or snow. The interior uses only natural illumination, with the angled skylights casting shadows on the concrete walls throughout the day, forming sharp silhouettes akin to a sundial. Ando says: ‘As a means of creating such an architectural space as a microcosm, I came up with the scheme of a space as simple and pure as a white canvas [with] natural light entering into it. A void in which everything superfluous has been erased, coloured by light that shifts with time and the seasons.’

His ninth building on the island, and part of the Benesse Art Site Naoshima, Valley Gallery is unlike any conventional art experience. Along the winding path that leads to the entrance, visitors pass a small lake with mirrored stainless steel spheres on its banks, part of Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden installation. Nearby is Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s Slag Buddha 88, which features 88 Buddha statuettes created using slag from illegally dumped industrial waste. Both pre-existing works, they have been on the island since 2006 and have recently been relocated and extended for the new gallery.

The uphill journey is intentionally elongated, allowing time for reflective pause in the surrounding nature, particularly in spring when azaleas and cherry trees are in bloom. ‘For a gallery to be a special place for art, the space on the approach to it is very important,’ adds Ando. ‘Like the entrance to a tea ceremony room, the slight change in the sequence of visitors’ steps leads their attention to the gallery.’

Ando’s architecture occupies the island’s most challenging and remote sites, connected by the theme of a ‘coexistence with nature’. It ranges from Chichu Art Museum, built into a mountaintop, to his own namesake museum, situated inside a 100-year-old timber house. With Valley Gallery, the architect intends to created a reflective, meditative atmosphere.

‘Like a Japanese shrine, we were aiming for an architecture with a certain spatiality that exists as a spiritual pillar for the people, even if on a modest scale,’ explains Ando. ‘By inserting stimulating artwork into this space, I hoped to create a microcosm, a small but infinitely deep space.’ The building exemplifies the trifecta of art, architecture and nature in harmony, making the journey to the island that much more profound.

INFORMATION

benesse-artsite.jp

tadao-ando.com

A version of this article appears in the May 2022 issue of Wallpaper*. Subscribe today!

The latest addition to Château La Coste’s ever increasing collection of architectural pavilions and art installations is billed as the final project drawn by Oscar Niemeyer. As recently as 2020, the owner of a Leipzig tram factory proudly claimed that a 40ft concrete and glass sphere, pinned to the top corner of one of his buildings and housing a restaurant and bar, represented Niemeyer’s last design (see W*241). As it turns out, Paddy McKillen, the founder of Château La Coste, has simply taken longer to finish his rather more substantial project. And even now, ten years after Niemeyer’s death, just a few days short of his 105th birthday, there are still schemes being worked on that carry his name.

Set in the rolling landscape of Provence and home to works by the likes of Frank Gehry, Tracey Emin, Tadao Ando, Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer and Ai Weiwei, Château La Coste now has an 80-seat auditorium that sits inside a circular white concrete drum, attached like a hinge to a teardrop-shaped, 4,000 sq ft glass-walled gallery. It sits in a dip in the vineyards that surround the hotel at Château La Coste, and is reached by a path that curls languidly through the vines, entering the pavilion across a shallow reflecting pool. These are motifs familiar from Niemeyer’s earlier buildings. He used water everywhere, from Brasilia to his office building for Mondadori on the edge of Milan. The confrontation of a drum-shaped solid element, with transparent free form glass, is a paraphrase of the cultural centre in Le Havre that he finished in 1983.

Niemeyer’s astonishingly long architectural career began in the 1930s when he was a young assistant in a team supervised by Le Corbusier designing Brazil’s ministry of education in Rio de Janeiro. In the 1940s, he met Juscelino Kubitschek, then mayor of Belo Horizonte, the city in which he designed his first independent buildings. After the war, Niemeyer sparred with Le Corbusier to shape the multi-authored United Nations building in New York. When Kubitschek became Brazil’s president, he appointed Niemeyer as the architect of his new capital city, Brasilia.

As a communist, Niemeyer left the country in 1964, when the army took over the government. While in exile, he built the headquarters of the French Communist Party in Paris, a venue later selected by Miuccia Prada in which to show a collection. He is certainly the only architect to have been awarded both the Pritzker Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize.

After 2006, Niemeyer became increasingly frail, though that did not stop him from marrying his 60-year-old assistant Vera Lucia Cabreira at the age of 98. In 2011, McKillen visited his studio in Rio, above the beach at Copacabana, to talk about Niemeyer’s project for him. ‘Oscar beckoned me towards a picture in his office of swimmers on Ipanema Beach, suggesting the building would be inspired by the female form,’ McKillen recalls. ‘I remember clearly his many questions on the vineyards at Château La Coste, and how he expressed his love for a good glass of red wine.’

By that time, the architect’s sight was deteriorating. He relied on his sense of touch to feel architectural models, and lightboxes to read the drawings made for him by his staff. He could no longer manage to do his party piece for the flow of visitors who came to see him. Until he was well over 90, he would ask them to name any of his many buildings, produce a pen and, without pausing to think, capture its essence with a single fluent black line on a sheet of butcher’s paper pinned to an easel. His assistant would unpin it, fold it up and present it as a gift.

Niemeyer had long since stopped travelling. He never saw the Serpentine Pavilion, unveiled in his absence in 2003. Nor did he go to the opening of his last sizeable project finished while he was still alive, the ill-fated Niemeyer Cultural Centre in Spain, which closed nine months after it opened in 2011, before reopening the next year under new management.

Jair Valera, an assistant who had worked for Niemeyer since 1974, went to see Château La Coste on his behalf in 2010. He walked the site, chose a location and went back to Brazil. In conversation with Niemeyer, he came up with four or five proposals. McKillen selected the one that has finally been realised. It sits on land protected by the local authority as agricultural, and so it took a protracted period of persuasion to secure the necessary permissions before McKillen’s team built the structure standing here today.

The Château La Coste project is unlikely to be the end of it. In Brazil, the appetite for posthumous Niemeyer projects, large and small, is seemingly insatiable. The year after Niemeyer’s death, his office, which by then was being run by Valera, alongside Niemeyer’s granddaughter, the late Ana Elisa Niemeyer (also an architect), picked up several large new projects, including a research park in northern Brazil and an aquarium planned for a coastal suburb of Rio. Back in France, with the final touches applied as we write, Niemeyer's pavilion at Château La Coste opens to the public this month.

INFORMATION

chateau-la-coste.com

Kunsthalle Praha, a major new not-for-profit arts and culture organisation has opened its doors to the public in the Czech capital. 

The building housing the new institution began as the Zenger Electrical Substation in the 1930s, generating electricity for the city’s tram and trolleybus network. The station became defunct as technology evolved, but was acquired by the Pudil Family Foundation in 2015 with the intention of giving the building a new life as Kunsthalle Praha. The institution focuses on 20th-century and contemporary Czech and international art and will function as an ‘open meeting point’ where art lives but also engages a wide audience.

Czech architecture studio Schindler Seko was tasked with reimagining the building as an art destination, which now comprises three large galleries, a bistro, a café and an extensive retail space. But it wasn’t without challenges.

Structural issues and contamination rendered the building’s original skeleton unfit for purpose; it was gutted and replaced with a monolithic concrete structure with the monument-protected facade kept intact. ‘It’s hard to create a good contemporary art space in a building that’s not purpose-built,’ says Ivana Goossen, director of Kunsthalle Praha. ‘[But] it gave us an opportunity to create a space that was really made for art.’

While the collection is important to the identity of the institution, it won’t form the primary focus. ‘From the beginning, we never wanted this place to be a temple for the collection,’ Goossen explains. ‘[The collection] allows us to exchange; when we request something on loan, we’re able to give something on loan. So it is a very important part of what we do, but we never intended to have a permanent show of the collection. We wanted to live the “kunsthalle” concept.’

This has created a model built on cooperation and a diverse mix of thematic and solo exhibitions, for which Kunsthalle Praha often partners with external curators and artists to develop a vision for each show. ‘Depending on the exhibition, the artists, and the opportunity, we will support the creation of new work. It’s a larger story we want to tell. I think it’s so important for artists to have the support to venture into a new area,’ says Goossen. 

Kunsthalle Praha inaugural show: ‘Kinetismus: 100 Years of Electricity in Art’

The opening exhibition ‘Kinetismus: 100 Years of Electricity in Art’ is an ode to the original fabric of Kunsthalle Praha. On view until 20 June 2022, the show surveys how electricity has transformed movements and artistic practices from the start of the 20th century to the contemporary era. 

Though the show is international and multi-generational, at its heart is a tribute to the work of Czech avant-garde art pioneer Zdeněk Pešánek. In 1936, the artist created a kinetic light sculpture titled 100 Years of Electricity for the facade of the Zenger substation, yet the installation mysteriously vanished before it got the chance, surviving only in the form of models. The Kunsthalle Praha team, spearheaded by guest curator Peter Weibel, chose to focus on bringing Pešánek’s ideas back to life, in dialogue with a century of electricity-driven art. 

This optically dazzling and comprehensive exhibition involves more than 90 works organised into four categories: cinematography, kinetic art, cybernetic art, and computer art. Visitors will encounter everything from the trailblazing experiments of Bauhaus-affiliated figures to cutting-edge immersive technology by teamLab. The show will include the work of pioneers such as Mary Ellen Bute, Carlos Cruz-Diez, László Moholy-Nagy, Martha Boto and Marcel Duchamp; established living icons such as Julio Le Parc, Cerith Wyn Evans and William Kentridge; and other leading contemporary names including Ryoji Ikeda, Refik Anadol, Shilpa Gupta, Olafur Eliasson, Xavier Veilhan, Random International, and Angela Bulloch. 

Alongside the inaugural show, Kunsthalle Praha has also unveiled a permanent commission by conceptual artist Mark Dion titled Cabinet of Electrical Curiosities, as well as a separate exhibition, ‘Electrical Substation: Electricity in Architecture, Electricity in the City’ which explores the building’s rich industrial past, and Prague’s history more broadly.

INFORMATION

’Kinetismus: 100 Years of Electricity in Art’, until 20 June 2022, Kunsthalle Praha. kunsthallepraha.org

Serpentine Galleries has revealed plans for its 2022 pavilion, titled Black Chapel, designed by American artist and urban planner Theaster Gates, with the architectural support of Adjaye Associates.

In a design rendering released today, 3 February, the pavilion – which will follow Counterspace’s installation for the annual commission last year – appears as a towering cylindrical structure bisected by a pair of rectangular doorways, with a domed roof that culminates in a single oculus. A low wooden barrier lines one side of the pathway to the pavilion, likewise paved in wood, leading to a panelled façade. The structural honesty of the design – there’s fluted exterior above the panelling and visible frameworks on the interior – contrasts with its considerable scale and deft manipulation of natural light. An accompanying statement describes the pavilion as ‘a sanctuary-like environment for reflection and communion’.

Serpentine Pavilion 2022: a space for music, poetry and dance

While the Serpentine Pavilion 2022 structure is predominantly in wood (which has a lower carbon footprint than brick), its form is reminiscent of the great kilns of Stoke-on-Trent, the ceramics capital of the UK. As such, the pavilion serves as the final chapter of ‘The Question of Clay’, a multi-venue presentation by Gates that previously included solo London art exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery and White Cube Mason’s Yard, as well as an intervention at the V&A ceramics galleries.

A bell, originating from Chicago’s St Laurence Church, will be placed at the pavilion’s entrance. Following the church’s demolition, Gates salvaged various architectural elements including the bell for his installation Martyr Construction at the 2015 Venice Biennale. At Kensington Gardens, the bell will once again toll to announce performances and activations, including Park Nights, the Serpentine’s programme of live encounters in music, poetry and dance.

The pavilion shares its title – Black Chapel – with an installation that Gates presented at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2019, at the invitation of the late museum director and curator Okwui Enwezor. Gates had filled the museum’s central atrium with ‘artefacts of Blackness from my life, to demonstrate the power embedded in the Black experience,’ he explained at the time. By naming the pavilion after his previous installation, Gates wishes to acknowledge ‘the role that sacred music and the sacred arts have had on my practice, and the collective quality of these emotional and communal initiatives.’  

The new Black Chapel brings together multiple facets of Gates’ life and work – his spiritual upbringing, his passion for music (he sang in the church choir, and continues to perform with his band, The Black Monks), his exploration of the joys and pains of Black life, and his ceramic art practice. It also reflects his fascination with architecture and placemaking, as seen in his lifelong quest to revitalise Chicago’s South Side one derelict building at a time.

‘I have always wanted to build spaces that consider the power of sound and music as a healing mechanism and emotive force that allows people to enter a space of deep reflection and deep participation,’ he says. To minimise its environmental impact, Black Chapel has been designed to be fully demountable. There are plans to re-site the pavilion to a permanent location after four months in Kensington Gardens, so it can serve as a space for gathering and contemplation in years to come.

INFORMATION

serpentinegalleries.org; theastergates.com

Iceland may be better known for its natural beauty than its art scene, but the opening of a multidisciplinary art space in Reykjavik is set to bring a new gravitas to the capital city’s burgeoning standing in the art world. i8 Gallery, one of the most established art galleries in the Nordics, has opened an epic second space across the harbour from its existing location. The new i8 Grandi is located in the Marshall House, a cultural centre within a historic factory in the Grandi harbour district, which also houses the Living Art Museum, non-profit gallery Kling & Bang, as well as Olafur Eliasson’s private studio. Its two sprawling floors will be devoted to year-long exhibitions, each dedicated to a single artist.

‘I was involved in the transformation of the building from fishing factory to arts space in 2017, along with Ásmundur Hrafn Sturluson and Steinþór Kári Kárason of Kurtogpí Architects,’ recalls i8 Gallery’s co-founder Börkur Arnarson. ‘Taking inspiration from spaces such as the Löwenbräukunst in Zurich, we felt that Reykjavik could use a multipurpose arts space. In the almost five years the building has been open, I have considered its potential for various projects, and the idea of single-artist, long-term exhibitions is an exciting concept for i8 to embark upon in this space.’

The gallery’s novel long-form presentation model is especially apt, given where the art world is today. ‘As the art world seems to only speed up, we thought it would be interesting to offer artists an opportunity to truly slow down. With a show spanning a calendar year, we can offer an exhibition that is on view for far longer than other gallery and museum shows,’ Arnarson explains. ‘Within that is a unique approach of shifting works during the exhibition: it will be fluid, sometimes growing and sometimes shrinking throughout the time on view. Local visitors can see multiple iterations of shows, and people who only get to Iceland once in the year will have a chance to experience a dedicated exhibition. This format allows all visitors, be it their first or fifth visit, to leave with a strong sense of the artist and their practice beyond what a typical gallery show is able to provide.’

i8 Grandi’s inaugural exhibition ‘In Relation to the Sun’ is by the Polish-born, Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade, whom i8 Gallery has represented for a decade. Throughout the year, Kwade will reconfigure elements and adapt works in the show, emphasising her recurring themes of space, time, science and philosophy. The exhibition features key works including her mixed media installation Connectivity of Force Free Bodies Ouroboros (2010), as well as new works on paper and sculptures from the last year.

‘[Alicja] was a natural fit to inaugurate our new space as her practice deals with issues of time, space, and conceptual considerations,’ says Arnarson. ‘She is a brilliant artist and has an incredible grasp of scale and form. i8 Grandi allows us to offer Alicja ample space to feature her sculptural installations, as she is particularly skilled in her approach to larger works.’

He concludes: ‘The ideas of space and time were intrinsically linked to i8 Grandi from the outset. The length of the exhibition lends [itself] to reflections on measurement, and, as so much of the world paused over the past two years, the consideration of time feels more relevant than ever.’

INFORMATION

‘In Relation to the Sun’ until December 2022, i8 Grandi, Reykjavik. i8.is

i8’s existing gallery at Tryggvagata 16 will continue with its regular programming, as well housing staff offices; the two locations are a 15-minute walk apart across the harbour. i8 Grandi will be open Wednesday to Sunday from 12am – 6pm, as well as by appointment.

The area surrounding Jerusalem’s industrial Sapir Center has long served as a pilgrimage for creatives. Located in the city’s south-west region, it’s home to artist studios, yeshivas (Jewish educational institutions), as well as Bezalel Academy of Art and Design's ultra-Orthodox branch. Its latest addition is the new outpost of Gordon Gallery, known as one of Tel Aviv’s most distinguished and long-standing art institutions. 

‘We are thrilled to usher in the next era of Gordon Gallery and further progress the dialogue between secular Israeli art and the religious connotation of Jerusalem,’ explains Amon Yariv, the gallery’s director, ‘the dichotomy of the new space and solo shows by two innovative painters to attract art seekers to explore Israeli art from a new perspective.’

The space – which will also feature a publicly accessible library and archive – has been inaugurated with two solo exhibitions by Israeli artists Ofer Lellouche and Aviva Uri, on view until 5 February 2022. At the heart of Lellouche’s exhibition, titled ‘Recent works’ is an imposing bronze sculpture, The Hug, whose raw, earthy colours reflect the building’s history. Nine of Lellouche’s reliefs line the walls and offer insight into the conception of the sculpture. 

Meanwhile, ‘Death in God’s Realm’ presents iconic works by Israeli artist Aviva Uri, ranging from work created in the 1960s, through to the time of her death in 1984. The works are infused with raw gestures – scenes of both angst and vitality – which continue to influence a generation of Israeli artists. 

The industrial space has been given new life by Tel Aviv-based Salty Architects, who have transformed the neglected workshop into a light-drenched space while retaining the rugged, industrial history of the building’s past. ‘The challenge was to set the space apart from its surroundings without being ostentatious,’ say architects Motti Rauchwerger and Hadar Menkes.

‘Inside the gallery, we designed a circular space, and it is important that one can keep moving in the space and be surprised. One of the surprises was the natural light in this industrial area. Once we opened the façade, we realised that wonderful natural light permeates the space.’

INFORMATION
gordongallery.co.il

A confluence of forces is behind the opening of Guild Gallery in New York, the latest enterprise from the locally-based design studio Roman and Williams. Situated along the vibrant thoroughfare of Canal Street, Guild Gallery is a beacon of contemplation that’s dedicated to showcasing the applied arts.

A celebration of individual makers and artists, many of whom have never had solo exhibitions before, the gallery opens with a year-long roster featuring 12 practitioners from around the globe – each a true force in their chosen medium, be it ceramics, glass or wood. First up is an exhibition of vessels by London-based ceramic artist Akiko Hirai (until 23 December 2021), with future programming set to include urushi-lacquer pieces by Japanese artist Kenta Anzai, and stone sculptures by Dutch artist Mirjam de Nijs.

Roman and Williams’ founders Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch are no strangers to this patch of Manhattan. Their pioneering retail operation, Roman and Williams Guild, which regally occupies the corner of Mercer and Canal Streets, just a few doors down from the new Guild Gallery, has brought a flood of well-heeled visitors to this cultural crossroads since it opened in 2017. Known for its impeccable curation of furniture, tableware and accessories, Guild heralded the resurgence of Canal Street as a hub for art, design and creativity – a reputation it continues to bolster, despite the impact of the global pandemic. 

Guild Gallery by Roman and Williams celebrates makers and artists

The idea to create an even more elevated platform began for Standefer and Alesch after the firm was tasked with re-envisioning the permanent British Galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The six-year undertaking culminated with the unveiling and opening of the new 11,000 sq ft space in early 2020 – just seven days before New York City went into lockdown. The enforced period of solitude that ensued gave Standefer and Alesch time to allow their personal pursuits and dialogues with artists and makers in their orbit to coalesce. 

‘Stephen and I have been very devoted to makers all over the world and that conversation became more present as we were working on The Met,’ says Standefer. ‘In the midst of trying to survive [during the pandemic], we started to see a shift in the cultural dialogue and revival of ceramic craft as an applied art,’ says Standefer. ‘Ceramics have been celebrated, but [mostly] in an environment that was contextual. At the Guild, people are able to experience these objects in the context of their homes, their lives and how they are used. From there, a dozen or so artists started to emerge, who I saw were already on a trajectory, they had credibility and goals and aspirations that were grander on a physical scale. They had training and focus that required us to start to spotlight them for their form.’

She continues, ‘If you look at Roman and Williams’ core practice, we’ve been fundamentally sort of maximalist, always about creating context and relationships and interactions between objects. We saw these 12 people and said, we need to consider isolating them. These artists’ practices demand a focused and elevated attention. I say this because it all happened very organically. We wanted to celebrate them in a more profound and focused way. We wanted to celebrate the handmade.’

The debut exhibition by Akiko Hirai is entitled ‘Container and Content’. Widely varied in scale and eluding classification with their idiosyncratic surface textures, Hirai’s poppy-pod and irregular moon-jar forms are intentionally ambiguous, some seemingly half formed and others on the brink of bursting to life. Displayed on custom-designed oak pedestals, which are accompanied by matching benches and translucent screens to create the opportunity for moments of introspection for visitors, the complex and monumental aspects of Hirai’s practice are clear to see.

‘Galleries rarely create contemplation and journey. The scrims are about not giving it all away immediately. The gallery is modest, it’s not that big, but we wanted to create some sense of the journey,’ Standefer says. ‘Everything is in a mono-material of oak, with a simple expression of the hand in the detail and joinery of the woodwork. These are all things you recognise when you're looking at surface and texture.’

She concludes, ‘I see ceramics as an unbelievable, almost semiotic investigation of the history of humanity. It is ancient, it is global, it is part of every culture. It’s part of our fundamental nature. I think in the pandemic, people started to look at nature and recognise the earth that we live on.’

INFORMATION

Works by Akiko Hirai are on view at Guild Gallery until 23 December 2021
rwguildgalleryny.com

ADDRESS

321 Canal Street
New York
NY 10013

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Dubai’s first permanent collectible design gallery and digital design platform, Gallery Collectional, has opened its doors during Dubai Design Week. The space, located in Dubai’s Eden House complex, is launching with the inaugural show, ‘The Shape of Things to Come’.

The first collectible design gallery in Dubai

The new gallery is the brainchild of luxury developer H&H, and offers both a curation of pieces and also the opportunity to connect customers keen for bespoke projects with designers and manufacturers, as well as sourcing rarer, one-off pieces. For Gallery Collectional creative director Catalina Ruiz Urquiola, the new space is a chance to take a closer look at the work of individual designers. In the ‘Shape of Things to Come’, new works by independent designers are presented alongside those of more established design houses in a thoughtful showcase that considers the dialogue between function and aestheticism.

‘The name of the exhibition is inspired by the objects, all of which have strong and dynamic shapes that push the boundaries of form,’ says Ruiz Urquiola. ‘The name also represents the beginning of a long journey for the gallery and refers to the possibilities that design presents to shape the future of the dynamic city of Dubai and the anticipation for what is to come.’

Debuting ‘Mirage’ mirrors by Sabine Marcelis

Sabine Marcelis’ new collection, ‘Mirage’, plays an integral role in the exhibition. Commissioned exclusively for the gallery and inspired by Dubai, it marks the designer’s first time exploring the possibilities of light through mirrors, with the warmth of the desert reflected in rich and vivid hues.

The collection joins other works by emerging and established designers from around the world, including Michael Anastassiades, Dimoremilano, CC Tapis, Ewe Studio, Kooij, and Alexander Lamont, who are contributing both exclusive and limited-edition pieces. ‘The exhibition champions modern craftsmanship – bringing together time-honoured skills, new technologies and innovative materials,’ adds Ruiz Urquiola. ‘Whilst our first exhibition brings together global designers, plans are already underway to work with local talent on championing collectible design coming from the region.’

INFORMATION 

thecollectional.com

ADDRESS

Eden House
Al Satwa
Dubai

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A pop-up art gallery in London’s Notting Hill (open until 30 October 2021) takes on the aesthetics and ambiance of an Asian bathhouse to explore the intersection between Asian identity and feminism. It’s a chance to view art in relaxed and welcoming surroundings and, with the project supported by Malin + Goetz, skincare is part of the experience.  

‘Zao Tang’ is the result of a collaboration between art and design studio Local Collective and multidisciplinary art practice Stigma to showcase new and recent works by a diverse line-up of six emerging and established East and Southeast Asian artists, through a range of media. The exhibition is both intimate and social, drifting away from the traditional art viewing to an immersive cultural experience.

‘We want to use the immersive art-viewing experience to activate community kinships through the physicalisation of social exchange,’ say Stigma co-founders Shutian Zhou and Cong Ding. 

While no water is involved – the bath is not filled, serving instead as a social gathering space – the gallery mimics the bathing ritual in Asian bathhouses. 

Visitors are invited first to ‘cleanse the self’, metaphorically ‘washing off’ pre-conceptions and everyday concerns by viewing artist Victoria Pham’s video portrait, Cô Gái Màu Đỏ, which explores and discusses colonised cultural heritage, and Stigma’s pseudo-fictional narrative Letters to Mr Tadpole, inspired by China’s former one-child policy.

As visitors go on to explore other artworks in the space – by Ayumi Kajiwara, Hannah Lim, Yushi Li, and Youngsook Choi – the opportunity to try a range of Malin + Goetz products, such as its Bergamot Hand + Body Wash, and Vitamin b5 Hand Treatment, both infused with the brand’s signature soothing bergamot scent, reinforces the emphasis on a relaxed and low-key experience.

The featured artists, says Local Collective founder Lisa Chan, were selected ‘to present a connective strength that speaks about the identity of Asian feminism, provide assurance to under-represented members of Asian communities of London, and invite all members to join in and celebrate cultural diversity’.

While viewers connect with the artworks, the exhibition is hoping to provoke thoughts such as ‘What does it mean to be an Asian woman?’

You can join the conversation at this bathhouse-inspired gallery, supported by Arts Council England, on view until 8pm 30 October 2021.

INFORMATION

Zao Tang pop-up gallery, open 11am – 8 pm, until 30 October 2021

stigmaroom.co.uk

itsalocalcollective.com

malinandgoetz.co.uk

ADDRESS

230 Portobello Road, London, W11 1LJ

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In 1947, photojournalism was at its height, and a handful of photographers – including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa – created a cooperative in Paris they called Magnum Photos. Ever since, it has been a photographer’s dream to be a member of this exclusive circle. 

But the landscape has changed since Magnum was first launched. Back then, magazines were more powerful, and photographers could more easily make a living in print. As photojournalism has followed the fate of journalism as a whole, ‘the art market has offered a new opportunity for Magnum to think about who we are and what we can offer’, says Samantha McCoy, the director of Magnum’s Paris gallery since early 2020. (There is a second gallery in London.) 

Magnum Paris: the new gallery

A New Yorker with impeccable art world credentials (her father is gallerist Jason McCoy, her great-uncle is Jackson Pollock), McCoy explains that the Magnum gallery was until recently a little-known appendage of its offices in northern Paris. ‘For the city where photography was born, I saw the chance to have a proper gallery and to reposition Magnum in the art world, with exhibitions that are exciting and intellectually stimulating.’

Magnum sold the former building and looked for a more central address where the gallery could be front and centre, while the photographers (who are all co-owners) would also feel at home. They found a 19th-century industrial building at the end of a passage in the 11th arrondissement. It had warmth and personality: wood and concrete flooring, brick walls, timber columns. The London firm Johnson Naylor was hired to redesign the interior. Fiona Naylor knew Magnum well, as her late husband, photographer Peter Marlow, had been a member of the agency. 

‘The building had great bones,’ Naylor says. ‘When you’ve got a building like that you enhance it, and layer in careful interventions.’ Visitors now walk in to discover the gallery first, along with an open library/bookstore containing Magnum’s superb collection of books. At the back, Naylor created a mini cold room and a private viewing room holding precious binders of contact sheets, including many by Capa.

Custom-made modular walls break up the gallery space. (They are inspired by ones that McCoy spotted at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris.) Naylor also designed glass vitrines where the gallery can display letters and archives, and she reused furniture from the old space, including vintage items by Jean Prouvé and Charles & Ray Eames, as well as a sofa by the Bouroullecs that sits invitingly in a window.

A staircase leads to the photographers’ offices upstairs. One photographer, Richard Kalvar, a Magnum member since 1975, was at the gallery opening wearing a camera around his neck, as he has done practically every day for the past half-century. ‘We’ve had galleries before,’ he says, ‘we’ve had serious people selling prints, but this I think is the first time we’ve had a real gallery gallery. This is a good show. It’s in a coherent space.’

For the inaugural Paris exhibition, McCoy paired two photographers and their visions of New York City, taken decades apart. Bruce Davidson’s photos of East Harlem in the 1960s and life in the subway in the 1980s, many of them vintage prints, hang alongside nighttime portraits at 125th Street and Lexington by the up-and-coming Khalik Allah, a nominee member of Magnum. The different bodies of work play off of one another, while showing the influence of Davidson, 88 and one of the all-time greats, on the younger man.

The gallery will host four to five different shows a year. At all times, collectors have access to contemporary and vintage prints by the range of Magnum photographers, from Capa to Raymond Depardon, Elliott Erwitt, Josef Koudelka, Inge Morath, Martin Parr, Alec Soth – nearly 100 in all. Next year, for Magnum’s 75th anniversary, McCoy hopes to have one of its living legends curate an exhibition of younger talents, once again paying homage to the past while aiming its lens at the future.

INFORMATION
‘Bruce Davidson & Khalik Allah: New York’, until 18 December 2021, magnumphotos.com

In Palermo, the Fondazione Merz has unveiled its second site, ZACentrale, which aims to transform the city’s ZAC (Zisa Arti Contemporanee) building into a contemporary art powerhouse. 

ZACentrale is sited within Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa, Palermo’s cultural district and hub for artistic experimentation. At the beginning of the 20th century, the area was home to one of Europe’s leading industrial producers of furniture. The Second World War prompted a gradual decline in factory output before production ceased altogether in 1968. After a block on demolition efforts, the City of Palermo began an ambitious process of regenerating the site, which is now home to more than 20 cultural organisations. 

Fondazione Merz – an independent institution established in 2005 by Beatrice Merz, named after Beatrice’s father, legendary Arte Povera artist Mario Merz – will operate ZACentrale from the 1,560 sq m ZAC building for a minimum of three years, turning it into a new cultural hub. 

The foundation is no stranger to breathing new life into historically significant structures. Its original Turin site is a former heating plant for the Lancia car factory and a quintessential example of the city’s 1930s industrial architecture. 

Group show ‘L'altro, lo stesso’ is part exhibition, part ecosystem, treated not as individual works, but as a living, breathing whole. Featuring new commissions by local Sicilian artists and works by international artists including Afghan artist Lida Abdul, Rosa Barba, Alfredo Jaar, Joan Jonas, Mario and Marisa Merz and Lawrence Weiner.

ZACentrale’s inaugural exhibition (on view until 27 March 2022) takes its title from L'altro, lo stesso (The other, the same), a collection of poems by Jorge Luis Borges, written in 1964. ‘In these poems, nature is the protagonist and through Borges’ gestural language, its strength and fragility are both explored,’ say curators Beatrice Merz and Agata Polizzi. ‘The dialogue between these varying generations of artists, who differ in time and intention, becomes a collective network, with each artwork contributing to the concept and function of the exhibition.’

INFORMATION

‘L’altro, lo stesso’, until 27 March 2022, ZACentrale, Fondazione Merz, fondazionemerz.org

With its rich artistic heritage, Belgium is fertile territory for art and design collectors, and two of them – Belgian architect Olivier Dwek and businessman Frédéric Hanrez – recently united to create a stunning new gallery space in Brussels. Called New Hope, it opened its doors during the Brafa Art Fair in January. 

Dwek is a tousle-haired character with a wickedly good eye and the confidence to take a morning Zoom call in his bathrobe. Architect to Belgium’s crème de la crème for the past 20 years, he is still something of a secret beyond the country’s borders (though, with seven Parisian projects under way and the release of a monograph published by Rizzoli, this will soon change). Growing up in a business-focused family, Dwek was an outlier with a passion for art.

He devoured autobiographies of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, learned to draw nudes at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, then studied architecture at the Institut Victor Horta. He is a collector, too. ‘Art helped me to sharpen my eye,’ he states. At only 28, he was commissioned to refurbish Louis Vuitton’s Brussels store, and in 2000, he founded his own studio, creating light-filled, modernist-inspired homes for well-heeled clients, often curating the art and design within. 

Hanrez is a Belgian entrepreneur as discreet and low-key as Dwek is bold and exuberant. A scion of an illustrious Belgian family with a lifetime passion for collecting, Hanrez realised about 20 years ago that he could get more bang for his buck with design. ‘I prefer to have the best in design, rather than second best in painting,’ he says. Having spent part of his childhood in Wisconsin, he was attracted to the craft spirit of American design, and now owns one of the world’s finest private collections of American 20th-century furniture, notably from New Hope, Pennsylvania.

In 2003, Hanrez inherited a building in central Brussels. Part of a family estate, the building had been turned into a ballroom by his great-great-great grandfather in 1865 to celebrate his 25th wedding anniversary. By the time Hanrez took it over, the ballroom was a ruin. It sat directly across the street from one of Brussels’ most iconic pieces of architecture (and a Unesco World Heritage Site), the former home of art nouveau master Victor Horta, which is now the Horta Museum. In fact, Hanrez says, Horta chose the address because the ballroom was low enough to afford him a view of its splendid garden. When Hanrez asked for a permit to raze the ballroom and construct a new building, the local authorities ordered him not to build any higher, in order to keep Horta’s beloved view intact.

Hanrez commissioned Dwek, a friend, to come up with a new space for what he calls his ‘three-dimensional art’. They tore down the old structure, leaving the street façade, which the authorities also required be left intact. They then searched out extraordinary materials – black lava floor stones from Malta, Swiss-made floor-to-ceiling windows, and black ‘Kolumba’ bricks handmade by family firm Petersen Tegl in Denmark.

New Hope took nearly five years of construction. Though it measures only 550 sq m, it feels larger, thanks to plenty of natural light, a double-height ceiling and multiple levels. Out back, the parallel lines of the awning and patio wall frame the park’s mature trees like a painting.

Graphic black and white tones provide a neutral backdrop for the collections, with a dramatic dash of colour from a massive green marble wall. Dwek meticulously selected the stones so that the veins would create a mirror effect, like a two-way Rorschach inkblot (the green wall also makes a nod to Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion).

Overlapping stone steps to a raised ground-floor level create a flowing effect, like flat rocks in a stream. A skylight is supported by black steel beams that Dwek compares to the legs of a Jean Prouvé table. The black lava flooring extends beyond the sliding glass wall to the patio, creating continuity inside and out. ‘There is no difference between architecture and interior architecture,’ insists Dwek, noting that predecessors such as Horta and Mies van der Rohe would not have dreamt of doing a building’s envelope and leaving the interior to someone else.

Standing in the garden, he points out the parallels between New Hope and the Horta house rising behind it: rooftops that are peaked on the left and lower on the right, three vertical windows on one side, bay windows on the other.

Hanrez is using the gallery to host temporary exhibitions, often in dialogue with his own collection, which is rich in pieces by Americans (George Nakashima, Phillip Lloyd Powell, Paul Evans and Sam Maloof ) and Belgians (Ado Chale and Jules Wabbes), as well as rare Scandinavian design. ‘I’m trying to keep this space dynamic so that people come,’ says Hanrez. ‘They know something will be happening here, and it’s always different.’

For the images on these pages (and in his new book), Dwek filled New Hope with works from Hanrez’s holdings and two other major Belgium-based collections. Hanrez’s American masterpieces, including an elaborately sculpted bronze cabinet by Paul Evans, shared the space with furniture by the likes of Jean Royère and Alexandre Noll from the collection of Frenchman Daniel Lebard, another low-profile figure. ‘He denies it, but he is the world’s biggest collector of French furniture from the 1950s,’ Dwek says. On the walls, Dwek put artwork by Richard Prince, Richard Serra and Philip Guston, all belonging to the collection of his friend Charles Riva.

Including New Hope, three of the nine buildings that Dwek selected for the book are foundations or centres for art, and he is keen to design more. ‘There aren’t many architects who know how to do it well,’ he says. ‘A piece of artwork releases vibes into the atmosphere – positive, negative, happy, sad. Architecture plays an enormous role when it can make those vibes resonate.’ 

INFORMATION

New Hope, 26-28 Rue Américaine, Brussels

Olivier Dwek: In the Light of Modernity, $65, published by Rizzoli

rizzoliusa.com 

A version of this article appears in the November 2021 issue of Wallpaper* (W*271) on newsstands and available to subscribers.

The Georg Jensen Gallery, the first pop-up from the Copenhagen-based brand, has opened its doors on London’s Bond Street. The space offers a chance to discover iconic silverware and jewellery collections, as well as playing host to exhibitions.

Currently on show is immersive paper installation Åen (Danish for ‘the stream’), which will run throughout October 2021. Artist Coco Sato, who designed the installation’s curving forms in oval quilled paper, was inspired by jewellery designer Jacqueline Rabun’s fluid silhouettes. Sato brings to life Rabun’s philosophy – ‘fluid shapes symbolise the way life transforms and evolves through our experience’ – for her paper pieces, which coil round Rabun’s classic and contemporary designs, the malleable loops and whorls of the paper reflecting the familiar forms of the jewellery.

The installation pays tribute to the sculptural swirl of silver that defines Rabun’s designs for Georg Jensen, on display in the space and epitomised in the ‘Mercy’ and ‘Offspring’ collections. ‘My design process is inspired by the human experience, and the journey of life,’ says Rabun. ‘The symbolic egg shape form of the “Offspring” collection I designed for Georg Jensen pays homage to the unique relationship between mother and child. It is close to my heart, as the collection was created in 2000 during a special moment when my son was a child. The fluid shapes in my work mirror the human form, so that when the pieces are worn they become a part of the wearer and move with your body.’

The Georg Jensen Gallery space itself, the result of a collaboration between the brand and Universal Design Studio, references both these flowing forms and Danish modernist Henning Koppel’s sculptural 1954 designs for Georg Jensen in its undulating design ticks. Cast in powder pink hues shot with playful bolts of Pantone blue, the interior’s organic design and soft tactile finishes invite visitors to immerse themselves in the jewellery’s sensual nature.

INFORMATION

georgjensen.com

Carpenters Workshop Gallery has unveiled a new limited-edition collection of sculptural jewellery. The collection, revealed at Design Miami/Basel, unites a curated selection of artists, designers, architects and specialist jewellers and comprises adornments that blur the lines between design and art.

Jewellers including Alice Cicolini, Sylvie Auvray, Hunrod, Hermien Cassiers, Kayo Saito, Alessandro Palwer, and Ane Christensen interpret figurative and architectural themes in carefully formed, miniature artworks. For some designers, it marks the first venture into jewellery design – Aldo Bakker, who had always refused requests to make jewellery for others, is seduced by the medium for the first time here.

Carpenters Workshop Gallery jewellery unveiled

Despite the eclectic nature of the group, all the jewellers have something in common, says Caroline Van Hoek, Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s head of jewellery. ‘They all share a commitment to meaningful and exceptional artistic practice. Carpenters Workshop Jewellery doesn’t have a main aesthetic, neither does the main Gallery. It’s very much about the artists, their practice and their relevance in their field. They all differ tremendously but have in common that do they create works that are sculptural and artistic.’

The jewellery celebrates intricate and sensual forms, from Belgian jeweller Hermien Cassiers’ hypnotising plays on geometry knitted in her own gold alloy formula, to Japanese jeweller Kayo Saito’s works that nod to calligraphy in their fluid silhouettes. French artist Sylvie Auvray has created over 20 silver rings that take on a mischievous life of their own, while Alice Cicolini weaves Eastern influences into her curved designs.

‘In keeping with Carpenters’ ethos of blurring the boundaries between art and design, the main criteria was the artistic expression and the importance of [the designers’] work within the jewellery world,’ adds Van Hoeck. ‘All the selected artists are exceptional in their creativity and practice, and are doing something new that will excite jewellery collectors.’

INFORMATION

carpentersworkshopgallery.com

Visual identity for the V&A exhibition ’Alice: Curious and Curiouser’, by Hingston Studio. Video courtesy of Hingston Studio

Art director and graphic designer Tom Hingston is best known for his work with the world’s top musical artists, including Nick Cave, Grace Jones, The Chemical Brothers, The Rolling Stones, Lady Gaga and Massive Attack. He’s also widely respected in the world of Wallpaper*, creating visual identities and campaigns for the likes of Christian Dior, Orlebar Brown and Veuve Clicquot. Here, he tells us about three recent projects: visual identities for the Serpentine Galleries and the ‘Alice: Curious and Curiouser’ exhibition at the V&A museum, as well as the newsstand cover of our August 2021 issue, dedicated to Design for a Better World. 

Tom Hingston and Serpentine Galleries

Ahead of Serpentine Galleries’ 50th anniversary celebrations, Hingston Studio was commissioned to redesign its visual identity in 2019, replacing a much lauded Pentagram design that was introduced in 2013. The brief, which proved prescient when the Covid-19 pandemic compelled cultural institutions to move into the digital realm, was to create a digital-first identity, with ‘a dynamic presence and a greater level of flexibility across multiple platforms’.

Hingston recalls he was drawn to ‘the notion that the urgent voice of the gallery, with its location in London’s Hyde Park, known for its history of protest and free speech, would be coupled with this sense of nature and openness to surround it. Space to think and breathe.’

He created a modular identity to reflect Serpentine Galleries’ duality – championing cutting-edge art and ideas in serene surroundings, occupying a small space compared to its peers while punching well above its weight. The flexible construction of his visual system, and of the individual letterforms, ‘allows a process of deconstruction, a kind of open invitation for artists and practitioners to reinterpret the identity in infinite ways’. On a more practical level, it also lends itself to versatile applications across social media, on the galleries’ website, digital screens within physical spaces, and the physical spaces themselves.

As part of his research, Hingston looked at patterns found in nature – growth rings from trees, wind patterns, the movement of water, and light passing through leaves – and then applied these behavioural characteristics to the typographic system. The headline typeface is bespoke, with bold, condensed letterforms that evoke strength and urgency. Its title, Platanus, derives from the Latin name for the London Plane tree, which dominates the treescape of Hyde Park. ‘Knowing that it will predominantly be in-house teams who use [it] on a day-to-day basis, the naming serves as a gentle reminder to the relationship the identity has to the park and its surrounding environment,’ Hingston says.

Within the wordmark, Hingston introduced radial cuts to the Platanus letterforms, adding a sense of movement and further referencing the irregular geography of the Serpentine Lake. Elsewhere, Platanus is complemented by two existing typefaces – Schick Toikka’s Noe, with large, wedge-shaped serifs that come to a sharp point; and Michael Mischler’s T-Star, a subtler sans serif with laterally flattened, round basic forms. 

Rounding off the system is an extended series of glyphs, including functional elements such as arrows and wayfinding symbols, and more playful forms that serve to add character and personality. As Hingston explains, ‘some reference the motifs you might find in the surrounding element, others act as a playful punctuation to the information system’.

serpentinegalleries.org

‘Alice: Curious and Curiouser’ at the V&A museum

A stone’s throw from Serpentine Galleries, Hingston has designed the visual identity for the V&A’s blockbuster exhibition, ‘Alice: Curious and Curiouser’. The show explores the origins, adaptations and reinventions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, charting its evolution from manuscript to a global sensation, so its identity is suitably ambitious. 

The museum wanted ‘to express its own interpretation of this iconic cultural figure, but also connect in a much wider sense with a multigenerational audience’, says Hingston. The timings of the show added to the burden of expectation; originally scheduled for 2020, it wound up opening in May 2021, when London’s museums could finally welcome the general public again after many months of closure: ‘So the campaign had to serve a dual purpose – announcing the Alice show, but also welcoming visitors back into the physical space.’

The messaging was complex, ‘and rather than try and work around that, we made a strategic decision to embrace it in a celebratory manner and flip the conventional hierarchy – text and messaging would become hero’, Hingston recalls. So it made sense to explore historical examples of design that featured a contrasting mix of messaging and typography; in particular, vintage circus posters with proclamations such as ‘roll up, roll up’, and ‘the greatest show is coming to town’. These posters would offer an expressive framework for the language of the Alice show, but also offer an opportunity to introduce various characters from the book. 

Within the visual identity, the calls to action became ‘Step Into Wonderland!’, ‘See the Amazing…’ and ‘Don’t be Late!’ Another departure from the vintage circus posters is the use of a sans serif, condensed font, which puts a fresh spin on the typology and allows it to feel more elastic in behaviour.

‘Different segments of messaging are treated as a series of building blocks, which are reconfigured, scaled and stretched to fit any given format in both digital and print. This in turn makes reference to the book’s famed exploration of perspective and shifting scales and size,’ Hingston explains.

Complementing the typography is a cast of characters from the book, including Alice herself, the rabbit, and the caterpillar. The two animals were created in collaboration with BAFTA-nominated puppeteers Jonny & Will in another meticulous process. Natural references such as fur textures and caterpillar skin were developed into sketches and then clay maquettes, and finally remodelled in CGI so they could be moved and manipulated in any way necessary for the visual design. 

Meanwhile, Alice was cast as a young actress who was filmed in live action, always from behind so her face would be concealed. ‘Alice means so many different things to so many different people, [so] maintaining this level of ambiguity around her character, whilst also retaining some obvious visual clues in her wardrobe, was essential to us.’ 

Hingston’s identity went beyond the V&A’s walls and promotional material to include the main entrance to the show, which leads down the striking wooden staircase in the museum’s Exhibition Road Quarter by AL_A. ‘It was an opportunity to transform the entrance into something more unexpected,’ explains Hingston. ‘We designed a glyph set of arrows which could act as a signposting device to help guide visitors in and down the space. These multidirectional arrows were also a nod back to the book itself – where Alice is being pushed and pulled along different paths.’ 

‘Alice: Curious and Curiouser’, until 31 December 2021, Victoria and Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London, vam.ac.uk

the V&A’s ‘Alice: Curious and Curiouser’ exhibition, and his newsstand cover for Wallpaper’s August 2021 issue

Wallpaper* August 2021 issue cover

Wallpaper’s relationship with Hingston dates back a decade – he was first interviewed in our April 2011 issue about a bespoke typeface and phone icons he’d created for a new Danish mobile phone company called Æsir, and in 2012 he was one of 30 cover artists (selected from 20,000 submissions) for our August Handmade issue. We have long been admirers of his ability to combine striking typography and distinctive forms with contextual rigour, so when we decided that we wanted a typographic newsstand cover for our August 2021 ‘Design for a Better World’ issue, he was our first port of call.

‘It’s wonderful to be invited back to create a cover for what is the new Handmade initiative – it’s a fantastic issue, featuring some incredible thinkers. Plus I share the honour with Piet Oudolf [who created the issue’s limited-edition cover], of whom I’m a big fan,’ says Hingston.

The issue celebrates the creative leaders and projects that are addressing some of the biggest challenges and concerns of our time – among them the Turner-Prize nominated Cooking Sections, who advocate for more sustainable food supply chains, architect Fernanda Canales, whose social housing encourages us to reconsider the meaning of luxury, and artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, whose epic VR experiences foster attention and engagement with the natural world. In response, Hingston wanted to ‘convey this notion of something that was incomplete, or a work in progress’.

Hingston and his team recalled their early development work for the Serpentine:

We were talking a lot about this notion of flexible systems, or rather, frameworks that were open and invited re-interpretation. That concept definitely seemed to resonate with the themes of the issue, as does the idea of something which is evolving or fluid

The cover typeface, which Hingston had started to draw in 2020 as part of the Serpentine identity, takes on a new appearance: ‘The more open letterforms invite the viewer to fill in the gaps, so there’s an interesting game at play here.’ Because the letterforms are of equal width, they could be treated like a series of building blocks that shift around the grid, which allowed for a more dynamic configuration – two of the lines are indented, and there is a double space between ‘for’ and ‘a’.

Early iterations of the cover design were two-dimensional, ‘about plotting points, defining parameters, and then testing how much or how little was needed to retain legibility’. But Hingston eventually decided on three-dimensional forms, to suggest ‘something more architectural, more physical, like an emerging structure’.

Unlike Platanus, the Wallpaper* cover typeface doesn’t yet have a name. ‘It’s an evolving identity, so I’m sure it will continue to take on a number of manifestations in future projects,’ Hingston says. ‘We’ve also been discussing the possibility of making it freely available. I’m interested in how other designers or individuals might choose to interpret the template.’

The August 2021 issue of Wallpaper* is now available as a free PDF download

INFORMATION

hingston.net

With thanks to Gillian McVey

Audemars Piguet Contemporary has commissioned artist Aleksandra Domanović for a vast new artwork, Becoming Another. The installation will be unveiled in Berlin later this week, to coincide with Gallery Weekend Berlin and will be on view until 10 October 2021. 

Domanović’s large-scale installation intertwines her own personal history with the technology-obsessed present. The artist, who now lives and works in Berlin, considers the political and historical implications of her birthplace, former Yugoslavia, in a piece that muses on the increasingly prevalent role of technology in our day-to-day lives.

‘We cannot only change our future – we can also change our history,’ Domanović remarks. ‘Sometimes this is called revisionism, other times interpretation. Ultimately, it’s about how our history and our stories are open to the possibilities and risks of perception.’ This idea is investigated in Becoming Another, which uses medical technology to explore the disconnect between appearance and reality.

Embracing both sculpture and computer-based media, Domanović makes the most of the large space of the former printing plant where the installation is on show. The piece showcases a collage of video images through rotating LED fan-displays, which alter depending on the viewer’s location. There’s a sense of jarring discord, which reinforces the idea of disparity between what is real and what we perceive.

Domanović is the latest artist to work with Audemars Piguet Contemporary, an initiative that supports international artists in the creation and exhibition of their work.

‘Audemars Piguet Contemporary has been following Aleksandra’s work for many years and we greatly admire her timely practice and diversity of positions,’ says art curator at Audemars Piguet Contemporary, Denis Pernet. ‘We are delighted to support her in the development of this new body of work that will contribute to the wider contemporary art discourse and raise questions about our future as we begin to emerge from the past year.’

INFORMATION

Becoming Another, by Aleksandra Domanović will be on view in Berlin at the former Der Tagesspiegel print house on Potsdamer Straße, 16 September – 10 October 2021

audemarspiguet.com

As the world digests the contents of the recent UN report on climate change, the book 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth by Serpentine Galleries’ artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist and curator Kostas Stasinopoulos couldn’t have been published at a more fitting time. 

Born out of Serpentine Galleries’ long-term project Back to Earth, the book includes a compendium of recipes, sketches, photographs, essays, spells and instructions that urge us to engage with the climate emergency in new and imaginative ways in our daily lives. With contributions from 140 artists, scientists, architects and filmmakers, the book follows a ‘do-it-yourself’ guide on how to shape a more ecological and equitable future. 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth offers innovative ways to rethink our relationship with our environment and change our actions accordingly, from some of the most creative minds of our generation.

Gustav Metzger who is renowned for his efforts to tackle climate change and raise awareness up until his death in 2017 was the inspiration behind the book. Artist James Bridle, who coined the term New Aesthetic, shows us how to assist a plant’s climate change migration journey by carrying them to a new spot. Meanwhile, musician Cosmo Sheldrake offers instructions on making ancient inks and Australian performance artists ask that we bury bananas. Alejandro González Iñárritu wants to get everyone involved by offering a manual for immigrants. Other featured artists include Olafur Eliasson, Etel Adnan, Pedro Reyes, Judy Chicago, Black Quantum Futurism Collective, Vivienne Westwood and Marina Abramović. 

The book is published to coincide with the multi-year initiative Serpentine Galleries project, Back to Earth. The programme is a catalyst for change which focuses on ecology and rather than supporting escape strategies from Earth, reserved for the few, it roots itself firmly in the realities of the ground we walk on. In a complex web of interconnected research, intervention and activities, the new book weaves in interdisciplinary knowledge to explore pressing questions: what new ecosystems can foster agency within exisitng ecosystems? And what kinds of collaborative working practices are necessary to present clear responses to complex problems?

INFORMATION

140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth, £9.99. serpentinegalleries.org

penguin.co.uk

Tattoos are art, believes the creator of new tattoo studio 6:19, which is why she has fashioned the space to look like a minimalist gallery. 

Located in Kyiv’s historic Podil neighborhood, 6:19 is the brainchild of painter and tattoo artist Ulyana Nesheva, best known for her delicate tattoo designs rendered in ultra-fine lines.

The minimalist aesthetic of Nesheva’s designs is reflected in the sparsity of 6:19’s interiors. ‘The idea was to rethink the vision of a tattoo studio in our country and create an ideal space for creativity,’ she says.

The studio design takes the ‘white cube’ format of art galleries and animates it with an open-plan layout that allows artists to tattoo alongside tables made for drawing new designs, and community members to meet and share ideas. 

There are almost no doors in the space and all the halls are unified to encourage movement around every area of the studio. In the centre of the studio is a mammoth, 800lb graphite concrete table with one side beaten down by hand, in a nod to the etching of ink onto skin during the process of tattooing. 

The table acts a reception area and a work surface for artists to design their future tattoos. The tattoo hall, filled with natural light and home to minimalist black beds, lies beyond the table and is visible through a large hole in the wall. 

It was important to Nesheva that even element of 6:19’s design was a work of art – from a hanging ceiling fixture created by the Ukrainian design company Propro, to the Mart Stam chairs, and the sculpture of a young boy that greets visitors as they walk through the entrance, made by local artist Сhristina Ridzel.  

The space is a gallery and studio in one, with art constantly on display and constantly in the process of being made. While all of the design fixtures and tattoos created at 6:19 are unique, they are ultimately united by their minimalist aesthetic. 

‘The concept of the studio is also that all our artists, despite the diversity of their styles and colours, are united by an exploration of minimalism,’ says Nesheva. ‘Simplicity is the ultimate goal and the highest form of complexity.’

INFORMATION

instagram.com/619studio

‘We hope that the intimacy and magic of this place are transported to the people who visit,’ says Iwan Wirth about the latest Hauser & Wirth outpost in Menorca, which officially opened to the public on 19 July 2021. The art centre – comprising gallery, education lab, restaurant, gardens and boutique – is located on Isla del Rey (Island of the Kings), a small island in the Mahón harbour that is the site of a grand but crumbling former naval hospital, built in the 18th century by the English.

The property also includes outlying buildings and the archaeological remains of a 6th-century basilica. Visitors arrive at this unique setting by boat (five euros for a return ticket), and are greeted by a candy-pink oblong Franz West sculpture – a cheeky statement that sets the mood for this exciting new art destination. 

Heritage, preservation and experimentation

For years now, Hauser & Wirth has been dedicated to renovating old architectural gems, beginning with their revitalisation of the Löwenbräu brewery building in Zurich in 1996 and cemented with the Somerset art centre in 2014. But in terms of its location and heritage, the Menorca project takes this passion to the next level. ‘We could not have picked a more complicated place to build an art gallery’, says Wirth. ‘It is highly protected, covered with rocks, there was no electricity, let alone the logistics of being on its own island.’

Menorca and the Isla del Rey are protected UNESCO Biosphere sites, and the naval hospital, which is across the way from the gallery, is currently undergoing its own renovations thanks to a team of volunteers who began their passion project in 2004 to repair parts of the building and record its fascinating history. 

Where local traditions meet global curiosity 

‘We have a curiosity or an appetite for unusual sites. We are constantly searching for places and spaces, but particularly for places which can be inspiring for the artists we work with, because an urban gallery/white cube can be quite limiting. We have to keep it exciting for them and for us.’

For the design, renovation and landscaping, the gallery turned to architect Luis Laplace and landscape designer Piet Oudolf, both of whom worked together on Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset outpost. It is a fruitful collaboration in all senses. Laplace sought to ‘enhance Menorca’ in his designs, to bring the island and its heritage into its own by using as much local, traditional and recycled material along with the island’s strong craft traditions.

Take for example the use of the local mares stone with its soft pinky-beige tones, local and recycled wood, and the handwoven straw lamps that decorate the outdoor space that is both for dining and relaxing. ‘The lamps were actually woven by a teenage boy from the island,’ recounts Laplace, who happened to see one of them in the back of a local shop. ‘When I asked the owner about the lamps, he said it was his son who made them for fun, a tradition taught to him by his uncle, and they were in fact traps to catch lobster and fish,’ he recounts. But Laplace saw their potential and commissioned the boy to make a series of lamps.

Nautical-inspired details such as blue cording wrapped on the gallery doors, red metal exterior lamps, metal hardware and sinks in the bathroom, and sailing flags that decorate the interior of Cantina, the onsite restaurant, remind visitors of the history of the island and the legacy of the naval hospital.

Laplace intuitively designed the gallery spaces so the entrance is slightly down an exterior walkway and through an open patio, rather than at the beginning of the building, allowing visitors to soak in the landscape en route. It is a subtle yet specific reflection of an experience that is about the outdoors as much as about the art. Louise Bourgeois’ Spider (1994) is installed in the corner of the entry patio and is part of a series of outdoor sculptures placed across the property including Joan Miró’s Pere Ubu and sculptures by Eduardo Chillida, whose solo show is currently on view at the gallery’s Somerset location. 

Hauser & Wirth Menorca’s inaugural exhibition explored uncharted territory 

For Hauser & Wirth Menorca’s inaugural exhibition, titled ‘Masses and Movements’, Los Angeles-based artist, Mark Bradford created a poignant body of work that consisted of a suite of richly layered, abstract canvases, globe sculptures and wall pieces (see W*267). Bradford took inspiration from maps and cartography, particularly the Waldseemüller map from 1507, the first known map to include the name America, and a series of installations about migration and movement made on site with a group of young art students from Menorca. 

The artist arrived a month before the scheduled opening in part to launch Hauser & Wirth’s Education Lab, a central part of the new art centre that will serve both as a space for gallery artists to create and collaborate with local artists and schools, but also be available throughout the year for educational workshops and events.

Hauser & Wirth Menorca: a utopian idea made real

As with community engagement, sustainability has become a core mission of Hauser & Wirth, having recently appointed their first sustainably director for the whole business. In Menorca, sustainable initiatives include the collection of rainwater, energy-efficient climate control, the landscaping by Oudolf, who worked with local plant experts to create a native flora garden that will renew and thrive all year long, and an exciting project to bring a small fleet of solar-powered boats to transport visitors – the first of its kind in the Balearics. In addition, Cantina is run by a local restaurant and vineyard, Binifadet and will focus on local and sustainable food that highlights the island’s culinary strengths. 

In many ways, Hauser & Wirth Menorca feels like a utopian idea about how art can be experiential and engaged with its place, the food, nature, community, and Wirth himself has said as much about this project. It is hard not to fall for the magic and be excited by its potential. An exhibition by American artist Rashid Johnson opens this summer – go for the art, stay for the experience.

INFORMATION
hauserwirth.com

ADDRESS

Plaça de la Constitució, 14
07701 Maó, Illes Balears, Spain

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A residential space has been transformed into a contemporary art gallery in Shenzhen, China. The architects behind it, Da Integrating, worked with the existing structure's bones to compose a clean, white space that is bathed with light and is rich in spatial play; welcome to the KennaXu Gallery. 

Hidden behind mature trees and rich planting, the existing building offered open space, simple geometries and was accessible via a picturesque winding path through architectural gardens. But there was one other reason that gallery owner Kenna Xu chose this particular site for his new venue. Built in the 1990s, the old residential block is part of the neighbourhood where Xu spent his childhood. Setting up the art space here meant he could not only start his new business, but he could also have it rooted in a strong, existing community while pursuing global ambitions. 

The architecture studio took on the challenge of transforming the residential interior into a design suitable for a commercial gallery, carefully considering light, colour and spatial arrangement in its composition. ‘[We] saw the possibility of establishing a deep connection between the gallery and people, nature and the city,’ say the team. 

In order to create transparency and bring in more natural light, the design team carved out large, square glazed openings on the façade. An extension brings the gallery into the garden and vice versa through generous windows and skylights. At the same time, a clean, white, minimalist space inside keeps things not only functional and versatile, but almost ethereal. 

‘The extraordinary, dramatic and immersive multi-sensory experiences reinterpret the possibilities of this gallery space, and make it an enchanting destination that visitors forget to leave,' say the architecture team. ‘The space itself is transformed into a delicate work of art, revealing the unparalleled charm of the contemporary art gallery.’

INFORMATION

daintegrating.com

Witherford Watson Mann (WWM) has competed its modernisation of London's Courtauld Gallery. The much loved art destination in Somerset House has been undergoing extensive reimagining by the Stirling Prize-winning architects for some five years, but has just announced a November return to the capital's cultural scene. 

Working through the gallery with surgical precision, the architects have refreshed the building, completely reintepreting the visitor's journey, and restoring and enhancing spaces within. The institution is made up of ‘disconnected houses/vertical buildings originally constructed to provide homes to a varied set of government offices and learned societies', say the architects. Using historical references and a keen eye for sensitively mixing old and new, WWM has worked hard to balance the needs of a heritage building with those of a prime, 21st century cultural landmark. 

This includes the restored Blavatnik Fine Rooms and the (newly named) LVMH Great Room – London’s oldest exhibition space, which was previously subdivided into smaller sections and will now be used to display Impressionist work. Alongside them, a brand new gallery has been created on the first floor for The Courtauld’s collection of paintings and decorative arts from the Medieval and Early Renaissance periods. 

Apart from the gallery, the transformation has also addressed The Courtauld’s facilities for teaching, research and students. This part of the project is much about functionality and the experiencing of art by everyone, as accessibility will be dramatically improved, and encompasses a redesigned reception area, carefully thought-out lighting, non-reflective showcase glass ramps, and a lift. 

‘This ambitious transformation project reimagines Sir William Chambers’ masterpiece to make it a public building fit for the 21st century,’ says practice co-director Stephen Witherford. ‘Through a careful balance of studious conservation and bold intervention we wanted to reveal the layers of the building’s evolution. Opening up spaces and transforming the layout of the building will provide a more versatile infrastructure for exhibition and exchange in a way that resonates with the distinctive characteristics of Chambers’ original design.'

The Courtauld’s collection, which includes masterpieces ranging from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, will relaunch with a variety of shows, the display of Oskar Kokoschka’s epic modern painting, The Myth of Prometheus (which is the largest work in the collection), and a new, contemporary commission by artist Cecily Brown.

INFORMATION

wwmarchitects.co.uk

courtauld.ac.uk

The Dia Art Foundation might always be first known for its idyllic premises upstate in Beacon, New York, but now it welcomes a new chapter in New York City with the reopening of its Chelsea foothold following an extensive two-year renovation. Armed with an expanded footprint that brings three of its former buildings together into one cohesive space, the new Dia Chelsea continues the institution’s history of repurposing and revitalising existing buildings. 

Designed by Architecture Research Office (ARO), Dia Chelsea retains the character of the original Chelsea neighbourhood which Dia has been a part of since the 1980s. Coming in at 32,500 sq ft, the gallery not only offers a substantial amount of street-level exhibition space (20,000 sq ft to be exact), but also has the capacity to host public performances and educational programmes (which it will conduct both in person and online). It also sees the return of the celebrated Dia Bookstore to New York City.

With such rare and dramatic environs on hand, Dia Chelsea suitably reopens with two new large-scale commissions by American artist Lucy Raven. Comprising a film Ready Mix (2021), and an installation from her Casters series (2021), the two projects address the formation and depiction of landscapes and civic spaces, specifically of the American West, and use abstraction as a means of giving them a fresh perspective. 

‘Dia’s mission has always been to help artists achieve ambitious projects. In a “post-pandemic” world where funding is scarce, this goal seems more important than ever and we have been expanding our collection and exhibition programme to include a greater breadth of artists,’ shares Dia’s director, Jessica Morgan. ‘The inaugural exhibition of new work by Lucy Raven has stemmed from more than four years of working closely with Raven and the resulting show is an investigation into film, perception, and the mythologies of the American West. In fact, all of the first exhibitions in Dia Chelsea are all with artists who are women, including Camille Norment and Delcy Morelos, which will similarly be the result of many years of collaboration. The approach of long-term conversation and support of artists remains our greatest priority.’

She continues, ‘Having exhibitions on view for extended periods offers the opportunity for long-term engagement; our exhibitions at Dia Chelsea will be on view for around nine months. We have also eliminated the admission fee at Dia Chelsea, so exhibitions will be permanently free to the public like all of our NYC sites. We felt this was incredibly important, both to encourage new visitors from the New York community, and to inspire repeat visits.’

‘We also have a distinct architectural approach in so far as we made a conscious decision with Dia Chelsea to preserve the unique qualities of these industrial buildings and not to build anew,’ she adds. ‘Our architects, ARO, have taken a ‘light touch’ approach to the buildings, retaining the natural light in the single-storey galleries from the skylights, as well as respecting the vernacular of the neighbourhood.’

‘The most challenging aspect of the Dia Chelsea renovation was designing three new facades to create an ensemble of distinct but related buildings,’ share ARO’s Kim Yao and Adam Yarinsky. ‘The design engages the scale and organisation of the internal spaces, addresses the functions of the openings for people and art and expresses the detailing of the brick walls. All of this comes together to present Dia’s identity, which is grounded in the character of the neighbourhood and the qualities of the existing buildings.’

In ARO’s hands, Dia’s legacy of creating exciting dialogues between art and architecture takes a more contemporary turn, particularly against the neighbourhood’s larger backdrop of soaring luxury residences that have sprung up in recent years. ARO’s work on Dia Chelsea is part of a longer-term collaboration, which includes the creation of Dia Soho, a new 2,500 sq ft exhibition space on Wooster Street, the revitalisation of two iconic Walter de Maria works, ‘The New York Earth Room’ (1977) and ‘The Broken Kilometer’ (1979) next door, and the expansion of the lower level at Dia Beacon and its surrounding landscape

‘For Dia (and in all our work) we believe that ‘design-centric’ means being strategic about what design means for Dia in terms of its history and mission and thereby define the role of architecture in the project,’ Yao and Yarinsky explain. ‘All our projects for Dia are connected by the fact that we frame our design approach to support Dia’s mission, which is centred on supporting the artists’ visions. The most visible thread is adapting and renewing the structure, materials, space and daylight of existing buildings (given Dia’s long history of adapting and reusing existing structures). Through this, the design of these buildings has reciprocity with the art.’

Morgan concludes, ‘Dia first established an exhibition space in  Chelsea  in 1987. With the opening of the new Dia Chelsea, I am so happy to finally give us a permanent home in this neighbourhood. It is vital that arts and culture are accessible to all and we are committed to offering an open door to everyone in our New York community and beyond.’ 

INFORMATION

Lucy Raven’s exhibition is on view until January 2022. diaart.org

ADDRESS

537 West 22nd Street
New York 10011

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Looking at each individual project by Sumayya Vally, it’s hard to pinpoint a ‘signature’ look or subject. There are installations, film and sound pieces, projects around food, community-focused schemes, fine art research, and traditional building works. Yet zoom out and examine her portfolio as a whole and her fascination with the ‘city’ becomes clear. Listening to her talk reveals even more: Vally is ‘obsessed with Joburg’.

Vally grew up in an apartheid-era township in Pretoria called Laudium. She credits the tight-knit community, ‘strong urban atmosphere’, and her experiences of going to a Muslim school from a young age and living in a relatively small space with informing her sense of community and city. Witnessing many people transcending that small-town context, through their work or studies, also played its role.

But it was Johannesburg that shaped Vally’s architectural approach and her passion for urban space. She often spent holidays with her grandfather, who owned a store in the city. Eventually she studied for the second part of her architecture degree there (architecture studies in South Africa include two parts in university, usually split by a break in practice). During this time, she admits to being completely taken by the varied, rich, urban environment of South Africa’s largest city. ‘I was obsessed with the city; reading it, understanding it, drawing it, filming it, absorbing it,’ she recalls. ‘I became really concerned that, after graduating, I would lose what that felt like, and that is how Counterspace was born, as a response, refusing to become jaded.’ Vally set up her practice in Johannesburg in 2015.

Working in the city before completing her studies– practising architecture at an NGO, and conducting research and installation projects for several national museums – proved transformative. ‘I had a lot more exposure to what was actually going on in the city,’ says Vally. ‘Seeing how people find ways to function economically, understanding ritual practices of the city – seeing how belief systems, for example, filter down into how people live. This can birth different or new kinds of architecture that we may not be focusing on in school. This is really rich ground to create architecture.’ And why shouldn’t buildings be created by taking into account different uses and ways of life? This is exactly the point between formal and informal architectural space- and place-making that Vally likes to unpick. ‘My work is focused on how architecture can be social and public and inclusive and diverse, but it’s from the perspective of a deep social project. There is this layer about history, future and archive that is left out [of mainstream architecture] at the moment.’ 

Over the years, Vally explored multiple areas of Johannesburg, choosing different communities to focus on. All of these places influenced her practice, she admits. There is Bree Street, an economic hub for the Ethiopian and Eritrean diaspora, which helped her understand forms of trade in the city; and Ntemi Piliso Street, home to her grandfather’s store, where she spent much of her childhood and first encountered Basotho textiles, and their ‘language’ and meanings.

Using this kind of ‘urban reading’, zooming in and out of cultural hotspots of activity, Vally followed her instinct and picked work that allowed her to develop her interests – a lot of it in the realm of research. In 2018, she worked with Yale University’s Denise Lim on the archive of artist Mikhael Subotzky (who shot the portraits on these pages) – in particular, his collection of trash from Ponte City. Created in 1976, the 54-storey cylindrical building (W*80) became iconic in Johannesburg, starting off as a desirable place for European expats, but later designated a ‘grey zone’ (an apartheid-era term for areas where people of colour could live). It changed character completely during the last decades of the 20th century, due to population shifts and the political situation in the country, becoming home to people from all over the world. Subotzky and artist Patrick Waterhouse collected the rubbish left behind when developers bought the building in 2008 and started to clean it out; the pair’s project is now part of the collection at SFMOMA.

Johannesburg’s infamous mine dumps (great mounds of waste on the sites of disused mines) in Booysens, Soweto, East Rand and West Rand also attracted Vally’s attention. Her research on the dumps and surrounding issues – socio-economic systems, belief systems, toxicity, racism, climate change – and how they affect the formation of cities, became a display at the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015. ‘It is a reminder of how segregated our city is,’ she says. Later, a pigment research part of the project became the Folded Skies mirror installation for the Spier Light Art festival in Stellenbosch in 2018.

‘I worked on researching how to recycle the mine dust and pigments from run-off to tint mirrors to reflect the colours of Johannesburg skies at different times in the day,’ says Vally. ‘There is a myth in Joburg that our skies and our sunsets are iridescent because of all the toxic dust.’

The city’s Yeoville Market, Fordsburg and Little Mogadishu in Mayfair, home to South Asian and Muslim immigrants, have a particular significance in Vally’s Pan African Plates, an ongoing project looking at how different communities gather around food. North-east of Pretoria in Mapoch, a village that maintains the traditions of the Ndebele people, she learned about the culture’s shapes and their meanings, for Ndebele Geometries. The project, a mobile installation to help children learn about mathematics through the distinct shapes found in the painted façades of Ndebele homes, is currently in development.

Digging a little deeper into Vally’s projects, it becomes clear that there are strong, common threads running through all of them – the notion of archive; ideas of coexistence and mixing of cultures, segregation and common ground; and how our background, be it cultural or political, can affect the way we live and structure our urban environment. These are themes that tie strongly into Johannesburg life as Vally experiences it, but also life in South Africa as a whole. ‘The nature of growing up in South Africa certainly informed my practice,’ she says. ‘On the home scale, the community scale, the urban scale, in the way I think about segregation.’ They are also themes that feel universal and can apply to anywhere migration has taken place – which is, on some level, most places.

This layering of design, history, culture and archival research in the creation of architectural output that speaks to its place and users has become a speciality for Counterspace. In 2019, Vally was invited to apply her perspective to the annual Serpentine Pavilion in London. Counterspace is the youngest studio to be awarded the commission; the pavilion will be the first built work of its kind by the fast-emerging practice. Delayed by the pandemic, it will be unveiled this year.

While Vally’s proposal includes the traditional physical structure (in this case to be made of cork and bricks from recycled construction waste), the project has grown branches that reach far beyond the pavilion’s usual remit at Kensington Gardens. ‘I didn’t want it to be an aesthetic manifestation, but I felt that it needed to be a representation of my ethos as a practice,’ she says. ‘I wanted to bring other voices into the pavilion.’ Rather than working on the physical structure first, Vally approached the concept from the opposite direction. ‘The intent to read, and draw in other places and neighbourhoods came first, and then I went into the form-making of the pavilion,’ she explains.

She researched migrant communities in London and photographed a series of spaces, especially gathering places, that represent, or used to represent, various migration waves and groups. ‘Some of the places existed but have now been erased,’ she says, flagging up as examples areas in Brixton, Hackney, Edgware Road and North Kensington. Her research includes anything from event posters to music records. Spaces of cultural production that, she feels, were not widely recognised at the level they deserved, play a prominent role. Case studies include one of the first venues to play Black music in the UK, the Four Aces Club in Dalston; the Centerprise publishing house that was a centre for the West Indian community; the Theatre of Black Women (Britain’s first Black women’s theatre company, operating during the 1980s); the iconic Mangrove Caribbean restaurant in Notting Hill; the first mosque in London; and informal venues, such as the sites of festivals and sidewalk events.

Vally treated the pavilion as a place to bring these forms of gathering and cultural manifestation together and into Hyde Park in an abstracted form. It is a design planned to encourage both one-on-one and larger encounters, both organised (through a programme of events) and casual – all this, of course, planned before the pandemic hit. ‘Now there are different kinds of opportunities to engage with, and we are developing projects that will have a life of their own, beyond the pavilion,’ she says. Counterspace’s Serpentine Pavilion is currently planned to go ahead for a June opening, unless the pandemic throws another unexpected curveball; either way, its intention and spirit are emblematic of Vally’s approach to architecture.

Meanwhile, more built work is underway – a mixeduse building in the Crown Mines area of Johannesburg is due to complete this year. Larger-scale architecture, cultural projects in particular, is something Sumayya Vally is keen to focus on in the future. ‘The slowness of research, the faster pace of installations, and then building too – all these speeds catalyse and inform each other,’ she says. Eventually, it all feeds back to the city, how we read it and how we push it, and the discipline of architecture, forward – in Joburg, and beyond. 

INFORMATION

counterspace-studio.com

At a time where most art galleries and institutions are still oscillating between the real world and a virtual one, the contemporary art and design gallery Salon 94 has doubled down on in-person viewing with the unveiling of a new home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Located in a palatial, six-storey building built between 1913 and 1915 at 3 East 89th Street, the neo-Renaissance structure originally served as an exhibition hall, library and entertaining space for the philanthropist and scholar Archer Milton Huntington, and as an artist’s studio for his wife, sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington. Designed by architect Ogden Codman Jr, who counted both the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers as clients, the building was created as an extension to the Huntingtons’ residence on Fifth Avenue next door.

In 1941, both properties were donated to the National Academy of Design, who used it as a museum and exhibition space until 2016. (They also built a third additional building next door.) These were put on the market as a whole, but ultimately sold separately, with Salon 94’s founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn buying 3 East 89th Street for a cool $22.3m in June 2019.

‘My husband had seen the buildings on the market. This last one available was the middle building of the National Academy. We walked in and I immediately thought it would make an amazing gallery,’ recalls Greenberg Rohatyn, an Upper East Side local. ‘We walked out and I actually didn’t bring it back up for a month or so, because when we’re looking at spaces together, it’s always with an eye to move, especially when our children leave home. Thinking of a space as a gallery involves an entirely different muscle. That’s what started in my head and I couldn’t let it go.’

With its rusticated limestone base, tan brick façade and elegant piano nobile, the building is hard for any art dealer to resist. ‘In the room on the second floor, which we call the Stone Room, you could really see the potential,’ she says. ‘To have a column-free space with so much ceiling height, and on the Upper East Side, is rare, as is the porte-cochère entrance.’

To bring the 17,500 sq ft mansion up to date, Greenberg Rohatyn turned to her friend, architect Rafael Viñoly, who has collaborated with her on three other projects over the years – her home on 94th Street, and the gallery’s two other locations downtown. (In anticipation of the move uptown, Salon 94 Bowery quietly closed its doors last November, but its Freemans outpost continues to stage exhibitions.)

Working over a period of almost 18 months, Rafael Viñoly Architects oversaw the renovation of the building, bringing a seamless quality to the project that underscores the building’s history. ‘One of the best things we’ve done is not to try to unify the rooms, but rather keep them more or less as they were,’ says Viñoly. ‘The proportional and volumetric condition of the building is like a museum in itself. The rooms are large, which is what moved Jeanne to buy it in the first place, and how you circulate through is pretty unique.’

The firm revitalised the marble and granite porte-cochère, which serves as the gallery’s point of entry, restored the herringbone brick paver floor and coronet light fixtures, and installed a new ceiling. The entryway leads to a 14ft-high gallery space, accented by penny-tile flooring and a wood-formed concrete ceiling. A lift provides access to the galleries and offices on the upper floors, but an ornate oval staircase, with its cast iron banisters and nostalgic grandeur, offers a more scenic route. 

On the second floor, the Stone Room boasts Doric pilasters with fluted shafts, Caen stone walls, round-arch bays and a chequerboard floor, made from Hauteville and Belgian Black marble, and encircled by richly patterned Rosso Merlino marble. A trio of fan-shaped windows with gilded espagnolettes open onto views of the Guggenheim Museum opposite.

‘When you see the space, you understand the guts and the vision, because obviously it is a major investment. It’s not your Chelsea gallery type thing. This has an added layer where some family transformed it into a party place; God knows what they did there,’ jokes Viñoly. ‘I, for one, don’t believe that it’s a major piece of architectural style, but it has its value because it carries a certain image of a way of living on Fifth Avenue and the Upper East Side. Now the signals are maintained but dimmed down so you don’t really focus on them – because it’s all about the walls and how the walls frame the art. The important things were structural modifications. It’s what you would call minor surgery, certainly not plastic surgery.’

The gallery’s programme of rotating exhibitions began in March with a triple header of solo shows by Brooklyn artist Derrick Adams, Japanese sculptor Takuro Kuwata and the late French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle. Greenberg Rohatyn also enlisted some of the designers she represents, under the Salon 94 Design banner, to create permanent, site-specific elements. Each was born simply ‘out of practicality,’ she says. ‘We wanted a beautiful chandelier in the stairwell and I felt that Philippe Malouin was the right designer to make something spectacular. It was just a straightforward call from there.’ Malouin’s statuesque sandblasted chandelier drops down two floors through the building’s stairwell.

Other custom pieces include limestone sconces by Max Lamb in the Stone Room, nylon benches by Kwangho Lee in new colourways on the first floor, and furniture by Tom Sachs in some of the gallery’s meeting spaces. The staff offices feature black nylon desks by Malouin, a new addition to his ‘Nylon Industrial Office’ collection, and in May the gallery will reveal a bathroom designed by Lamb using curved, cobalt blue tiles from Japanese brand Tajimi Custom Tiles.

The building’s third floor houses the Wood Room, a mahogany-panelled office for Greenberg Rohatyn, custom-designed by Viñoly. ‘I challenged him to reimagine what a wood-panelled room would be like today, given that the wood panelling here had been destroyed,’ she recounts. The harlequin-patterned wall panels are inlaid with concealed brass hardware in each corner for hanging art. ‘You can change the hanging positions of the art without disturbing the geometry of the surface,’ explains Viñoly.

With a café, shop and artist residency in the works, Salon 94’s new flagship location brings with it the conviction of a full cultural recovery. ‘Covid allowed us to slow down and take a step back,’ says Greenberg Rohatyn. ‘It’s been a reset for both myself and my team, a chance to rethink what the gallery represents and what we are going to be in the future. Space can change your point of view, and I like that movement forward.’

‘Even in this crazy moment of the pandemic, it’s the kind of place that will come back very strongly,’ sums up Viñoly. ‘It’s really a unique revitalisation and a private contribution to the famous Museum Mile.’

INFORMATION

salon94.com

vinoly.com

Grand Hers is new collection of sculptural horn combs created by designer Aurore Piedigrossi and now on show at Geneva’s Máti gallery. 

The project is an homage to the history of the Hers Valley in the south of France, which, when described by ECAL graduate Piedigrossi, reads almost like a fairytale. ‘The manufacture of combs is a craft that developed in the 14th century in the Hers Valley,’ she says. ‘The production was organised in many factories that were established along the river [the Hers, or Grand Hers].’

‘Millions of combs were produced each year in the region and were distributed around France and exported around the world. There were horn combs of all kinds, for all types of hair. The arrival of plastic in the middle of the 20th century gradually led to the closing of the factories and the loss of the know-how associated with horn comb production, as people turned to the more modern and less expensive plastic combs. Today, that craft has almost disappeared in France.’ 

The destruction of fine craft at the hands of industrialisation is a familiar story, and one Piedigrossi hopes to rewrite with Grand Hers. By moulding each of the horn combs into unexpected, sinuous shapes, she has transformed an everyday object into a sculptural work of art.

‘The comb is a very classic object in its shape,’ says Piedigrossi. ‘It has become a commonplace object of our daily life and therefore almost invisible. I wanted to offer it a new perspective, to make it evolve in a way.’

The result is an enchanting meditation on the history of the Hers Valley, as well as combs and how we use them. ‘It is a fascinating object to me,’ observes Piedigrossi. ‘The comb has been around in our civilisations for millennia, in infinite forms and materials. It has a special meaning in every culture, and can be found in traditions, but also in myths and rituals.’ 

‘I like the fact that we all have a personal relationship with our own comb; it is full of emotion and meaning. There’s an aesthetic in its use and its connection to the hair. Beyond that, I think it's a beautiful object. I fell in love with it somehow.’

In this way, Grand Hers has found an ideal match in Máti gallery. An incubator of emerging design talent, the young, nomadic gallery is dedicated to ‘breaking down the boundaries between art and design [so that] everyday objects become works of art’.

Grand Hers is currently available to purchase from Máti and is set to be followed by a more extensive line that will include other hair accessories.

INFORMATION

matigalerie.ch

A flexible gallery has just been completed as part of the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester. The project, spanning an impressive 725 sq m and forming the institution's new Special Exhibitions Gallery, has been designed by London-based architects Carmody Groarke.

The new cultural space occupies a majestic Grade II-listed structure, dating back to the 1880s. Housed within a part of the museum's network of Victorian railway viaducts called New Warehouse, the design embraces the original architecture's historical character. High vaulted ceilings (at 5m tall) define the structure, which is largely made of cast iron and terracotta-coloured Victorian brick.

Clever additions, such as light, full-height, fibre-glass panelled walls at the entrance area (which have been coloured to match the period brick walls), bring the interior into the 21st century without overpowering the interior's original character. There is step-free access for visitors, while sustainability has been addressed through design decisions to reduce life-cycle costing, light pollution and carbon emissions.  

‘We were inspired by the powerful presence and character of the Victorian engineering and architecture when designing the new Special Exhibitions Gallery,' says studio director Andy Groarke. ‘By counterpointing the carefully restored historic building fabric with bold new materials, our architectural interventions reframe and repurpose the already wonderful spaces within the New Warehouse as a backdrop for exhibitions and visitor welcome.'

The project is part of the Manchester museum's long-term refresh, aimed at future-proofing the much loved cultural institution and pairing great design with sustainability. This is only the grand scheme's first phase, with more to follow in the coming years. The new gallery is currently closed due to pandemic restrictions but it is ready to throw open its doors as soon as these are lifted. 

INFORMATION
carmodygroarke.com

South South is a new online platform devoted to art from the Global South and its diaspora, bringing together over 50 galleries spread across five continents.

Spearheaded by the dealer Liza Essers, owner and director of Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg/Cape Town/London) and in partnership with a gallery consortium that includes leading gallerists from Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Mexico City, Kampala and Tokyo, among other places, the initiative was born out of a critical need to strengthen south-south collaborations that have previously existed out of plain sight.

The year-long project launches with South South Veza (23 February – 7 March), consisting of an invitation-only selling event powered by auction technology, a peer-led online viewing room (OVR), and an archive-in-progress. Further elements include Institutional Hybridity, a talks programme curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of London gallery The Showroom; a film programme curated by Rodrigo Moura, chief curator of El Museo del Barrio in New York; and an exhibition titled KIXIMBI: meditations on the middle passage and other Atlantic phantoms, curated by architect Paula Nascimento and writer Suzana Sousa.

KIXIMBI takes the seas of the South Atlantic as a point of departure to explore the forced movement of people across continents historically and at the present, as manifested in contemporary artworks. Featuring artists including Francisco Vidal, Aline Motta, António Ole, Dalton Paula, Yinka Shonibare and Buhlebezwe Siwani, the exhibition brings together ‘artists of the Global South and its diaspora that are part of different geographies who exist in their own contexts and carry a collective memory present in their practices and identities which resonates directly and sometimes indirectly to the African continent.’

Nascimento and Souza add, ‘we do not think of “the diaspora” as an isolated space (or people) but rather, consider how a sea such as the Atlantic serves as as an important link in the relations between the continent and the distinct but similar cultures that exist elsewhere; both in terms of the religion (African religions as well, as for instance the orishas and the gods of the sea), but also in terms of sea mythologies, the people who died during the Middle passage and the ones who continue to die today crossing to Europe.’

In a move to actively counter the limited financial support available to not-for-profits in the region, the auction will forego buyer’s premiums, and 20 per cent donations from sales will go to support the critical work carried out by local organisations including Raw Projects in Dakar, Green Papaya in Manila and Casa do Povo in São Paulo.

South South is timely and necessary in its addressing of art world imbalances and promotion of fairer value systems centered on community, collaboration and exchange that counter challenges faced by artists of the Global South and its diaspora both in their local contexts and globally.

INFORMATION

south-south.art

Last September, when Richard Rogers stepped down from the architectural practice that he founded more than 40 years ago, he still had one personal project underway. Now, the last building of Rogers’ long and distinguished career, the new Drawing Gallery at Château La Coste in Provence, is complete. It’s tiny, but spectacular. Vivid orange and hovering, apparently weightless, the building cantilevers out of a thickly wooded ridge too steep for planting the vines that grow in neat rows on either side.

The gallery is the latest addition to developer and hotelier Paddy McKillen’s remarkable collection of art and architecture across the Château La Coste estate – a winery and cultural destination that includes his smallest hotel, Villa La Coste (W*214). McKillen also leads The Connaught and Claridge’s, and other luxury hotels in Monaco, Los Angeles and Kyoto.

Rogers joins a roster of stellar architects who have contributed buildings to the Château La Coste project. In 2008, McKillen tasked Tadao Ando with creating a pavilion, and a reflecting pool for Louise Bourgeois’ Crouching Spider and Alexander Calder’s Small Crinkly. He followed this up with a chai de vinification (wine storehouse) from Jean Nouvel and a gallery designed by Renzo Piano, while he also shipped in Frank Gehry’s 2008 Serpentine pavilion from London.

McKillen had wanted to add a building from Rogers, a long-time friend, ever since he acquired Château La Coste. It took time for the right idea to emerge from a series of conversations, most of them involving lunch. During a weekend at the estate in 2011, McKillen, Richard and his wife Ruthie Rogers took a bike ride along the chalky track of an old Roman road that skirts the vineyards. ‘I gave Richard two things, the idea of a gallery to show drawings, and the view,’ McKillen remembers. That was when Rogers hit on the idea of creating the gallery as a single dramatic gesture, a giant cantilever that leaps off the ridge seemingly into mid-air with no visible means of support. It was the chance to realise a long-held ambition, to pay homage to the cantilevered terraces of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater that Rogers had first seen as a student at Yale in 1962.

McKillen recalls two crucial moments in the evolution of the design. The first was at Courchevel, where he and Rogers went skiing the following spring. ‘Richard took me to see a house projecting off a hillside held up by a single column. I remember him saying, “If we can’t get the gallery to work, we can always put in a column”. But it was that column that gave it all away. And that’s when I said, “It’s either 100 per cent pure, or it’s not, and if it’s not pure, better not do it at all”.’

Stephen Spence’s sketch for the pavilion. Richard Rogers’ best known early work is arguably the Centre Pompidou in Paris, completed in 1977 with Renzo Piano. In the same year, the architect founded the Richard Rogers Partnership in London, which evolved into Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) in 2007. Now the practice has 11 partners and has just launched a new office in Paris – marking Rogers’ retirement by returning, in a way, to where it all began. ‘We currently have a range of exciting new projects in progress there, in a range of typologies at a wide range of scales,’ says RSHP partner responsible for France, Stephen Barrett. ‘Prompted by Brexit and the regrettable drawing up of once permeable boundaries that it implies, we are finally taking the plunge in setting up a Paris office, all these years after the project office that Richard and Renzo established in the early 1970s. Of course, we’ve never really been away, and London and Paris are so very close, but this step is also an affirmation, an important symbol of confidence and commitment to a country and to clients we value deeply.’ 

Wright used reinforced concrete to launch a pair of terraces into space. Rogers’ cantilever is tailor-made from steel tubes. According to his engineer Bob Lang, ‘it works like a see-saw’. A pivot positioned on the edge of the ridge takes the load. The shorter, landside arm is anchored to foundations sunk into the ground by two sets of galvanised steel rods. They counterbalance the weight of the longer arm that forms the gallery, a box inside the steel frame, with a glass end wall trained on the view of the green Luberon hills like a telescope, and no support in sight.

The next conversation was at the Rogerses’ house in Chelsea, London. It’s where McKillen, Rogers and his long-term collaborator Stephen Spence decided on the exact shade of orange to paint the steel. In working out the optimum size of the gallery, they looked close to home. The volume is 5m wide, the distance between the kitchen counter and the windows of the Rogerses’ house. It is also 4m high, matching their mezzanine, and 24m long, exactly twice the width of the room.

Making buildings that touch the ground as lightly as possible has always been as much a part of Rogers’ work as his love of bold colour, and making the most of a view, from the first house he built in Cornwall as a member of Team 4 with Norman Foster, to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The new gallery has all three attributes. Equally important to Rogers is the idea of rescuing the construction process from the messy uncertainty of a building site.

Another of Stephen Spence's early sketches for the project. The Drawing Gallery at Château La Coste is part of a growing list of work in France for the office, including: Maine Montparnasse masterplan, 2019-ongoing; Gare de Lyon Daumesnil masterplan, 2014-ongoing; Bercy Charenton masterplan, 2009-ongoing; The Roads of the Future Grand Paris, 2019; One Monte Carlo, 2019; Centre de conservation du Louvre à Liévin, 2019; Terminal 1 at Saint Exupéry Airport in Lyon, 2018; Grand Paris, 2013; European Court of Human Rights, 1995

The gallery, completed with the help of local architects Demaria Architecture, was prefabricated at the Bysteel factory in Portugal, a process that began with a team slicing through heavy steel tubes at precisely the right angle, with just a chalk mark for guidance. The next step was welding the major pieces together; no easy task, given that as the metal cools, the weld shrinks. Engineering consultant Michael Hasson, who guided the fabrication for Rogers, calls the skills demanded to get the steel to behave as needed ‘a collision between art and science’. João Manuel Faria de Sousa, who led the Bysteel team, recalls: ‘We had a 100 people working on the project. You could see their enthusiasm. It was like making a sculpture.’

With the kit complete, the pieces were bolted together in the factory to make sure everything fitted. Then they were dismantled, loaded onto two lorries, and driven to Château La Coste. For the last leg of the journey, the pieces were transferred from the trucks to a tractor trailer and moved to the site along a farm track, to be assembled with little more than a spanner, a cherry picker and a set of temporary supports.

Now that it’s finished, the gallery is a powerful summation of Richard Rogers’ work, as much as a place to enjoy the landscape around it, and the temporary exhibitions it will accommodate.

INFORMATION

rsh-p.com

chateau-la-coste.com

Unno, a new gallery dedicated to contemporary Latin American design, makes its digital debut ahead of a physical space opening in Milan later in 2021. The gallery was founded by architect and sculptor Laura Abe Vettoretti and interior designer Maria Dolores Uribe, two creatives operating between Latin America, the USA and Italy. The pair met in Mexico City: ‘we came together as Unno after meeting in the same point of view: that Latin American Design should be portrayed to the world as pure, deep, raw, mystic and elegant,’ they say.

The gallery aims at presenting a contemporary vision for Latin American design and celebrating its creators. The debuting collection includes works by Abe Vettoretti and Uribe, contributions by Mexican designers Cesar Nuñez and Bandido Studio, as well as pieces by Brooklyn designer Ian Felton inspired by Pre-Columbian animism. 

The founders stress that this is ‘a gallery by and for young designers,’ hoping to reframe the traditional idea of the region’s aesthetic and steer it towards a contemporary collectible design vision – what the pair calls ‘a cultural breaking point’ achieved through ‘connecting and recapturing our transcendental roots’.

‘The perception of Latin American Design is crafty, folk-inspired and colorful,’ state the duo. ‘At Unno we want to show that there is more to that, that there is a conceptual deepness behind what we create, and that Latin American design can be elevated to the highest standards in art and design.’

Debuting collections reference ancient Mexican architecture, the sun’s symbolism celebrated in pre-Colombian inscriptions, pre-Hispanic architecture, Mesoamerican culture and artistic movements from Colonial Mexico. Each piece was made by local craftsmen to celebrate shapes and materials such as jade, lava, cast bronze, onyx, obsidian, brass and black marble.

‘We want to portray the intellectual assets of our represented designers as a solid sample of contemporary collectible design, distant from mere craftsmanship,’ conclude the two founders. ‘And through this project, we learned how important it is to keep our ancestral techniques alive.’

INFORMATION

unnogallery.com

Newly-launched gallery Máti made its debut as a new nomadic space for creative collaborations, with the aim of presenting design exhibitions in different spaces throughout Switzerland. Starting with an online showcase from its Geneva base, the gallery’s inaugural show unveils the work of five young designers from France and Switzerland, working across disciplines and aesthetics.

‘The galerie breaks down the boundaries between art and design. Everyday objects become works of art, the artists become artisans, and practices intersect,’ reads a statement from the two founders, art directors Myriam Combier and Anne-Laure Fuchs (a former Wallpaper* designer). ‘MÁTI strives to be contemporary by conceiving new, meaningful collaborations that reveal the distinctive approaches of its artists and designers.’

Designers included in the inaugural collection are Dimitri Bähler, Jean Besson, Marie Cornil, Giulio Parini and Réjean Peytavin, five creatives working at the cusp of art and design and whose practices are based on creative experimentation. Bähler’s graphic paintings, Besson’s balanced mobile sculptures, Cornil’s embroidery, Parini’s cymbal-shaped lamp and Peytavin’s ornamental porcelain pieces take the designers’ expertise out of their comfort zones and into new, exciting territories.

The works presented are mundane objects rethought with different creative practices and an artisanal slant. ‘We have always shared a common dream of bringing together our passions and experiences for design, art and graphics. MÁTI was born out of our interest for objects and a taste for beauty,’ continue the two founders. The pair’s passion certainly manifests itself in this project, and in a new creative studio, which they will run alongside the gallery’s programming offering art direction and across the fields of art, culture, fashion and beauty.

INFORMATION

matigalerie.ch

From resurrected churches to roller skating rinks and subterranean reservoirs, we reflect on the past lives, and reincarnations of the world’s most extraordinary contemporary art spaces. Explore the untold history of art.

Von Bartha

Past life: a lighthouse 
Location: Copenhagen

Von Bartha recently became the first international gallery to open a space in Copenhagen. Located at Pasteursvej 8, its distinctive building includes a listed former lighthouse (officially known as Kridttårnet) in the Carlsberg region of the city, developed for the brewer in the 19th century by founder Carl Jacobsen.

Marking its first location outside Switzerland, von Bartha’s new space continues the gallery’s track record of striking architectural transformations, with von Bartha’s original Basel space housed in a former petrol station. The new Copenhagen location comprises 75 square metres of gallery space with an outdoor courtyard for sculpture and was inagurated with group show, ‘An Outline Taking Shape to Become a Profile’.

GES-2 House of Culture, V-A-C Foundation

Past life: a tram power station
Location: Moscow, Russia

V-A-C Foundation’s GES-2 House of Culture, Moscow was one of the most hotly anticipated openings on the 2021 art calendar. Reimagined by Renzo Piano and over a decade in the making, the former power station is located on the Bolotnaya Embankment, a hotbed for industrial redevelopments and stone's throw from the Kremlin. Built between 1904 and 1908 to power the city's tram system, the building was designed in the Russian Revival style by architect Vasili Bashkirov.

Piano’s space is a 41,000 sq m canvas of white and grey, save for the bold blue of the pipework, a hangover from the building’s previous life. GES-2 was founded on the idea of a Soviet House of Culture, and was inaugurated by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson in December 2021. His performative work, Santa Barbara – A Living Sculpture, is a bold, theatrical piece examining the complex relationship between Russia and the US. 

The Center for Contemporary Art, Tashkent

Past life: a diesel power station
Location: Tashkent, Uzbekistan

The building that now houses The Center for Contemporary Art Tashkent (CCAT) is where electrification of the city began, and where Uzbekistan’s contemporary art landscape is now being regenerated. Designed by architect Wilhelm Heinzelmann in 1912, the facility was a diesel power station operating Tashkent’s first tram line, and Tashkent City Enterprise of Electric Grids following the 1917 Russian Revolution. In 2019, a year after the building transferred to Uzbekistan’s ministry of culture, CCAT became the country's first centre dedicated to modern and contemporary art, which aims to develop contemporary culture throughout Tashkent and Central Asia. Beyond exhibitions, the centre is a hub for performances, cinema screenings, art residencies and seminars. 

Its recent exhibition, 'Dixit Algorizmi' traced the roots of modern-day algorithms to the historic mathematician and Father of Algebra, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwārizmī. Curated by Joseph Grima, the show featured work by artists, musicians, filmographers, architects, designers and theorists.

Public Tobacco Factory

Past life: a tobacco factory
Location: Athens, Greece

Top: Nikos Navridis, Try again. Fail again. Fail better, 2013, courtesy the artist, NEON and Bernier/Eliades Gallery. Installation View ’Portals’, Hellenic Parliament + NEON at the former Public Tobacco Factory. Above: Former Public Tobacco Factory – Hellenic Parliament Library & Printing House (pre-renovation)|

In the 19th century, tobacco served as one of Greece’s most important exports. In Athens, the Public Tobacco Factory, constructed in 1930 to cultivate this coveted crop, has recently been transformed into a stage for world-class international art. ‘The former Public Tobacco Factory building is an iconic structure in the city centre, a symbol of the country’s path to industrialisation and, at the same time, a footprint of its architectural heritage,’ says Elina Kountouri, co-curator of the recent exhibition ‘Portals’ and director of Neon, the non-profit arts organisation founded by collector and entrepreneur Dimitris Daskalopoulos who co-organised the show and renovated the historic building.

Though the story begins with tobacco and ends with world-class contemporary art, the shapeshifting industrial building has demonstrated versatility over its near-century history. It’s done time as a prison, been a Second World War air-raid shelter, housed Romanian refugees, been home to the Greek Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Finance, and its present occupant, the Hellenic Parliament, with which Neon collaborated for ‘Portals’, which includes new commissions by Glenn Ligon, Duro Olowu, Teresa Margolles, Michael Rakowitz, Danh Vō and Chrysanthi Koumianaki. 

Fruitmarket gallery

Past life: a fruit and vegetable market
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland

There’s at least one clue in the name: this Edinburgh art centre was once home to a fruit and vegetable market. The gallery combines two former market buildings: one built in 1889, and one in 1938. The latter was converted into a gallery in the 1970s by John L Patterson, with one part serving as a Scottish Arts Council venue.

The Fruitmarket soon became a hub for the who’s who of 20th-century art, with solo shows by the likes of Richard Hamilton, Frank Stella, Willem de Kooning, Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Hockney. In 2021, the Fruitmarket still finds itself on the cutting edge of contemporary art following a two-year redesign, expansion and refurbishment at the hands of Reiach and Hall Architects. The vast industrial gallery reopened in 2021 with a reimagined retrospective by Turner Prize-nominated artist Karla Black.

MAAT Museum

Past life: A thermal power station
Location: Lisbon, Portugal

On the banks of the River Tagus, Lisbon, there’s a conversation happening between two entirely different buildings. Though a century apart, they do have one thing in common: the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology. 

Built in 1908, Central Tejo was a thermal power station that supplied the entirety of Lisbon with electric power, operating non-stop between 1909 to 1954. The iron and brick-covered building, typical of late 19th-century ‘electricity factories’, draws on a mix of influences, from Art Nouveau to classicism. In 1990, it opened to the public as the Electricity Museum, offering a journey through the history and evolution of electricity production, technological feats in renewables, and the EDP Foundation art collection, dedicated to contemporary Portuguese artists

Also on the industrial EDP Foundation campus, but at the opposite end of the architectural spectrum, is a building housing the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT). Designed by British architecture studio AL_A (Amanda Levete Architects) and opened to the public in 2016, the low-slung structure, comprising 15,000 three-dimensional tiles, can be walked over, under or through, and reflects the institution’s convergence of contemporary art, architecture and technology. Among those who have exhibited at MAAT are Pedro Reyes, Lawrence Weiner, Grada Kilomba and Tomás Saraceno. 

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art

Past life: A flour mill
Location: Gateshead, UK

On the south bank of the River Tyne in Gateshead sits a former flour mill re-imagined as the UK’s largest contemporary art institution. Completed in 1950, it was built by food giant Rank Hovis to a late-1930s design by architects Gelder and Kitchen. The mill closed in 1981 and lay derelict for over two decades. The idea of Baltic as we know it today was conceived in 1991 when Northern Arts (now Arts Council England North East) announced plans for a ‘major new capital facilities for the Contemporary Visual Arts in Central Tyneside’.

Under the guidance of Baltic’s inaugural director Sune Nordgren, the focus officially shifted from flour to contemporary art. Construction began in 1998 spearheaded by Ellis Williams Architects and comprising six main floors, three mezzanines, and 3000sqm of arts space including studios, a cinema/ lecture space, shop, library, archive and rooftop restaurant. In 1999, there was a pause in construction, during which time the building got its first taste of art. Anish Kapoor was commissioned to create Taratantala, a colossal site-specific artwork, that occupied the vast, void-like space.

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art opened in 2002. The inaugural exhibition, ‘B.OPEN’, featured work by Chris Burden, Carsten Holler, Julian Opie, Jaume Plensa and Jane & Louise Wilson. Since then, Baltic has launched an artist award, and presented over 226 exhibitions of work by 476 artists of 64 nationalities including Holly Hendry, Judy Chicago, Ryan Gander, Lubaina Himid, Adam Pendleton and Lorna Simpson. 

Wiels

Past life: A brewery
Location: Brussels, Belgium

In 1862, following attempts at trading in baked goods and cloth, the Belgian Wielemans-Ceuppens dynasty ventured into beer. Following rapid expansion and a quest for innovative techniques, the family invested in a brand new flagship brewing hall, one that would become the largest in Europe and a landmark on the Brussels urban landscape. Designed in 1930 by architect Adrien Blomme and praised as a ‘perfect example of modernism’ the striking building (also known as the Blomme building or the Wielemans tower) still brims with traces of its industrial past.

During 2005-2008 renovations, some of the brewery's original operational features were restored, such as copper vats and tiling in the brewing hall. In 2007, the building took on new life as a centre for contemporary art. In addition to 19,000 sq ft of exhibition space, the building hosts an auditorium, studio workshops for artists-in-residence, and a café and bookshop in the titanic brewing hall. Among those who have presented work in this laboratory of contemporary art are Wolfgang Tillmans, Yayoi Kusama, Franz Erhard Walther, Mark Leckey, Luc Tuymans and Rita McBride. 

TJ Boulting

Past life: an ironmongery and sanitaryware manufacturer 
Location: Fitzrovia, London

Originally founded in 1808, furnishing ironmongers TJ Boulting & Sons were responsible for the manufacture of range and stoves alongside gas, electrical, sanitary and hot water engineering. Sited on a corner in the heart of Fitzrovia, its Arts and Crafts building is still inscribed with the original Art Nouveau lettering in gold and green mosaic tiles. The company, which moved into the building in 1903, has something of an intriguing claim to fame, said to have fitted the first flushing loo in Windsor Castle, before the more widely known Thomas Crapper made his mark. 

In 2011, inspired by the building's roots, Gigi Giannuzzi and current director Hannah Watson established TJ Boulting as the new gallery space of publishing house, Trolley which specialises in photography, photojournalism and contemporary art titles. Over the last decade, the gallery has carved a reputation for dynamic shows of emerging and mid-career artists. Previous exhibitions include Dominic Hawgood’s shape-shifting ‘Casting Out The Self v3.1’ and ‘Birth’, curated with Charlotte Jansen.

La Patinoire Royale - Galerie Valérie Bach

Past life: a roller skating rink 
Location: Brussels, Belgium 

This is a gallery with a big claim and quite a few past lives. Constructed in 1877 as Royal Skating, it became one of the world’s first roller skating rinks, in a time when popularity for the recreational sport was at an all-time high. In 1900, roller skate wheels turned into car wheels as the space transformed into a Bugatti garage, and later a weapons depot during World War Two. Built in an ornate Neoclassical style, the building’s facade is punctuated by distinctive circular and arched windows, flooding the interior space with a sea of natural light. In 2015, gallerist Valérie Bach acquired the space, enlisting John-Paul Hermant architects to transform it into a hub for Belgian and international Modern and contemporary art with a focus on kinetic installations and abstraction. The 3,000 sq m internal space, masterminded by Pierre Yovanovitch, has since hosted striking contemporary art interventions by the likes of Joana Vasconcelos, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil. 

KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Past life: a margarine factory
Location: Berlin, Germany 

KW is widely known as a cultivator of radical contemporary art, but one might be less familiar with the unexpected past life of its building. The original Baroque structure was built for residential purposes in 1794 and remains one of the oldest buildings in Berlin’s Auguststraße. Its transverse wing was built in 1877 for industrial use, most recently, as a margarine factory called Berolina Margarinefabrik during the German Democratic Republic era.

In 1991, Klaus Biesenbach, Alexandra Binswanger, Philipp von Doering, Clemens Homburger, and Alfonso Rutigliano saw the potential in this crumbling factory as a platform for provocative avant-garde art. Its global reputation has since been cemented by landmark thematic shows including ‘Berliner Chronik’ (1994); ‘One on One’ (2012/13); ‘Fire and Forget. On Violence (2015)’; and ‘The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue’ (2019/2020) and major solo shows by Kader Attia, Ceal Floyer, Carsten Höller, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Petrit Halilaj and Adam Pendleton. To hail the institution's 30th anniversary in 2021, KW hosted a series of new commissions and exhibitions by the likes of Renée Green and Susan Philipsz. Responding directly to the building, artist Sissel Tolaas created a limited-edition soap composed of particles collected at KW.

kw-berlin.de

Pirelli HangarBicocca

Past life: a locomotive factory
Location: Milan, Italy

When it comes to scale, there’s nowhere quite on par with the sheer enormity of Pirelli HangarBicocca. The site once occupied one of the most burgeoning industrial centres in Milan, spearheaded by engineer Ernesto Breda in 1886. This vast complex of factories, which included tyre manufacturing giant Pirelli, produced railway carriages, electric and steam locomotives and was later adapted to manufacture aeroplanes and projectiles during the First World War effort. One factory was HangarBicocca, a gargantuan 15,000 sq m space comprising three main areas.

In 2004, after a decade of neglect, Pirelli transformed the space into a non-profit art foundation staging major annual solo shows and permanent installations. Many indicators of the building’s industrial past are still intact. The 30-metre-high, 9500 m sq Navate, constructed between 1963 and 1965 still has visible traces of the rails used to test locomotives, and now hosts Anselm Kiefer’s monumental permanent installation The Seven Heavenly Palaces, commissioned for the foundation’s opening. There’s no doubt that a space like this takes a particular blend of courage, ambition and vision to fill. Among those who have surmounted the task to jaw-dropping effect are Philippe Parreno, Ragnar Kjartansson, Kishio Suga, Marina Abramović, Joan Jonas and Cerith Wyn Evans. 

Cisternerne

Past life: a subterranean reservoir 
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark

If it weren't for the world-class art installations, the uncanny depths of Copenhagen’s Cisternerne might be akin to a cathedral crypt or The Chamber of Secrets. The ex-subterranean reservoir was built from 1856-1859 to improve the water supply to the Danish capital and became defunct in 1933. It was deserted for decades before starting a unexpected new life in 2001 as The Museum of Modern Glass Art. In 2013, it was acquired by the Frederiksberg Museums and has since played host to ambitious annual art installations with globally-renowned contemporary artists. As exhibition backdrops go, there is nowhere quite like the challenges of the Cisternerne. Among those who have stepped up to the task to dizzying effect are Jeppe Hein, Eva Koch, Ingvar Cronhammar, Superflex, architect Hiroshi Sambuichi and most recently, Tomás Saraceno.

E-Werk 

Past life: a coal power station 
Location: Luckenwalde, Germany

The transition from power station to art gallery is a fairly well-trodden path, and though E-Werk may not have the show-stopping scale of Tate Modern or Shanghai’s Power Station of Art, unlike the aforementioned institutions, it still generates power. The building was constructed in 1913 as a coal power plant and shuttered its doors soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 30 years later, the space was resurrected by Artist Pablo Wendel and his not-for-profit arts organisation, Performance Electrics, as explored in Wallpaper's October 2019 issue (W*247). E-Werk offers residential programmes, workshops, studio space for artists, exhibitions, and its own, patented power source: Kunststrom (art electricity) harnessed through wood chip-burning machines still compatible with the building’s pre-existing infrastructure - an electric fusion of art and power.

Planta

Past (and present) life: an industrial gravel pit  
Location: Lleida, Spain

An industrial complex on the northern edge of rural Catalonia is perhaps the last place one might expect to stumble across an Anselm Kiefer, or a Bill Viola. But coexisting with the daily buzz of lorries and cranes shuttling around mounds of gravel, are spaces dedicated to site-specific contemporary art. Planta is an innovative project on the intersection of art, science, architecture, and enterprise. It’s managed by Fundació Sorigué, the foundation of the Sorigué Business Group, who, aside from a zest for contemporary art, focus on material science research and sourcing sustainable building materials. Sites include an enormous hangar which plays host to Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz’s Double Bind (previously exhibited in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall) and an ex-air raid shelter (constructed during the Spanish Civil War) which houses a video installation by Bill Viola. Others who have exhibited in this lunar-like industrial landscape include Tony Cragg, William Kentridge, and a project with Chiharu Shiota is in the pipeline. 

König Galerie – St. Agnes Church

Past life: a brutalist church 
Location: Berlin, Germany 

König Galerie has a track record for tracking down unusual gallery spaces. Their London space was, after all, an underground car park until 2017. But six years before then, they took on the challenge of turning the heritage-listed St. Agnes – a former Catholic church and built in 1967 by German architect and post-war modernist Werner Düttmann – from dilapidated brute into a striking stage for international contemporary art. Sited in the Kreuzberg area of Berlin, St. Agnes comprises a former chapel and nave which were artfully transformed from church to gallery by architect Arno Brandlhuber. Among those who have taken full advantage of the gallery’s light, lofty and utterly monumental proportions are Claudia Comte, Elmgreen & Dragset, Camille Henrot and Katharina Grosse.

Arquipélago

Past life: an alcohol factory
Location: Ribeira Grande, São Miguel, Portugal 

In 2015, a 122-year old industrial volcanic stone and timber building in the town of Ribeira Grande on the Portuguese island São Miguel Island went from alcohol factory, to ‘culture factory’. The building was reborn as the Arquipélago Centre for Contemporary Arts, an interdisciplinary creative hub, at the hands of Portuguese architects Menos é Mais Arquitectos Associados and João Mendes Ribeiro. Located in the middle of the Atlantic, The Azores are known as a portal between Europe and the Americas. The centre takes its name from the nine islands that form the archipelago, and has a mission to ‘observe, stimulate, disseminate’ through a programme of visual art exhibitions, workshops, performances, concerts and artist residencies. Arquipélago is a harmonious, and forward-looking fusion of geography, eras and creative disciplines.

Like so many entrepreneurs and business owners this year, the contemporary art advisor and former journalist Adora Mba had to place plans to open her contemporary art gallery in Accra, Ghana on hold. Mba’s ADA \ Contemporary originally intended to stage its first show, by Collins Obijiaku, in March, but it opened six months later. The delay allowed Mba to refine her strategy and strengthen relationships with the artists she represents.

Committed to nurturing Ghana’s emerging art scene, ADA \ Contemporary’s second show, the debut of the self-taught Nigerian painter Eniwaye Oluwaseyi, titled ‘The Politics of Shared Spaces’, presents an exciting body of work that contemplates the identities, narratives and power struggles formed within the layered frameworks that accompany the shared space. Explored through a portfolio of 12 large-scale canvases, the exhibition investigates the contexts of shared living spaces, communities and mindsets, while offering a commentary on the politics of race and class.

‘I see portraiture as a means to impart a social commentary,’ explains the 26-year-old Oluwaseyi, who only began pursuing art a year and a half ago. ‘Each work brings attention to an individual of a certain socioeconomic background and outlines underlying political issues by shedding a light on a marginalised person or community, all-the-while examining the identities and power struggles within our shared spaces. With my work, I hope to spark up comprehensive conversations with those that see them, no matter where on the globe they may find themselves.’

He continues, ‘I focus primarily on the dynamics of power struggles: from sharing my viewpoint on the #EndSARS protests currently happening in Nigeria, to bringing people's attention to the Albino communities in Sub-Saharan Africa, who have been caught in the crossfire of ignorance and Black colourism [and killed as a result].’ 

Each of Oluwaseyi’s portraits captures its subjects within a vacuum of ambiguity, inviting the viewer to reconsider what is being prioritised in the visual space. Using a vivid colour palette and intentional compositions, Oluwaseyi also asserts the idea of co-existence by presenting his subjects in a non-dominant manner. Working in oil on canvas, his intricate brushstrokes convey both a refinement and vulnerability to the subjects being portrayed.

‘I try to combine unusual colour palettes to go beyond the borders of religion, race and tradition,’ he explains. ‘I use colour as a means to communicate the subject matter since skin colour is rooted in my work, but [also] as a medium for creation and expression. Colours are reflections of my moods and feelings while I paint each piece. I purposefully choose vibrant colours to embody the term "person of colour,” in an aspiration to emphasise that we, as Blacks and Africans, are likewise majestic people.’ 

Eniwaye concludes, ‘I believe that if we are able to coexist in a communal space, no reason will arise to ostracise some or harm others whom we may not “understand”. Within our personal spaces, we can seek to work together at peace without placing priority over anyone in the face of their identity, race or position. If this can be achieved, then we can project these same ideals onto our communities as a whole.’ 

INFORMATION

Eniwaye Oluwaseyi, ’The Politics of Shared Spaces’, until 27 December, ADA \ contemporary art gallery, Accra. ada-accra.com

ADDRESS

ADA \ contemporary art gallery
Ground Floor, ALTO Tower
Villaggio Vista
North Airport Road
Accra, Ghana

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As one of the great pioneers of postwar American painting, the trailblazing artist Sam Gilliam has made a profound impact on American art throughout his six decade-long career. Starting in the 1960s when he began making works that both expanded and disrupted the principles of Colour School painting in Washington D.C., Gilliam quickly became known for his groundbreaking Drape paintings that saw stretcher-less lengths of painted canvas suspended from the walls and ceilings of exhibition spaces.

As a Black artist based in the nation’s capital during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Gilliam’s approach of redefining existing norms was not simply by coincidence. His re-envisioning of the art medium as a means of reflecting the major changes taking place in society is something he has continually explored over the years. This has allowed him to spearhead a new path that stems from Abstract Expressionism, but also draws from other facets of Black culture, be it the improvisational aspects of jazz, thanks to his childhood spent entrenched in the musical culture of Tupelo, Mississippi, or the influences of other personal heroes.

Gilliam, in fact, credits the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane for teaching him how to paint, saying, ‘It’s time that matters: listening and realising what happened with the music, my experience of sound established these references in painting.’

This month, the 86-year-old Gilliam unveils three new bodies of work at Pace Gallery in New York – his inaugural exhibition since signing with the gallery in July 2019, which also marked the first time he has been represented by a New York gallery in his career. Entitled ‘Existed Existing’ and staged at both of Pace’s locations on 510 and 540 West 25th Street, the expansive exhibition includes large-scale paintings, a series of wood sculptures that are drenched in colour and monochromatic paintings on Japanese washi paper.

Gilliam’s eye-catching sculptures take shape as pyramids, parallelograms and circles – elemental forms in ancient African architecture – that are made from stacks of stained plywood and aluminium, coated in paint. Inspired by observing the influx of African immigrants in Basel, during an extended stint while installing an exhibition there in 2018, the monochromatic pieces command a regal degree of attention.

At the core of the new show is Gilliam’s series of large-scale paintings, ranging from six by eight ft to eight by 20 ft in size, that explore the density and physicality of colour. Highly textured due to the mixing of sawdust and other remnants from around the studio into the paint as well as the application of multiple layers, Gilliam’s gestural splatters of paint create hypnotic fields of colour that are then suddenly interrupted by the artist’s hand, marks made by a palette knife and even traces of a garden rake dragged across the canvas.

These paintings pay homage to Gilliam’s heroes and heroines, including the late civil rights leader Senator John Lewis, tennis player Serena Williams and Beyoncé (in the titling of the works). They also count on his other established formal archetypes, such as Gilliam’s signature bevel-edged paintings – a technique of mounting that makes the works appear like they are emerging from the wall – that he began using back in the 1960s. Oscillating between past and present, in a state that appears as both liquid and solid, dense and flat, these paintings are an inspiring representation of the fluidity and inconsistency of time.

INFORMATION

‘Sam Gilliam: Existed Existing’, until 19 December across Pace’s 510 & 540 West 25th Street spaces

pacegallery.com

It’s early September and a plague of flies has just descended on a farm in Mooseurach, Germany where Sean Scully has a studio. ‘A fucking fly bit the middle of my tattoo out’, says the artist over FaceTime, pointing at his forearm towards the now-dismembered Celtic symbol for fertility.

An interview with Sean Scully is like a portrait sitting with a sitter that needs little direction. He describes his life and work in a quilt of similes and anecdotes stitched together with warmth and wit: his coarse upbringing, familial fondness, traumas, brushes with US politics, fervent spirituality, those he admires – from Agnes Martin to Tess Jaray and Béla Bartók – and vibrantly hued recollections of his rise to become ‘the token of abstraction.’

Scully, as he says, came from abject poverty. ‘I probably did the biggest stretch in the history of the art world’ declares the 75-year-old artist. He’s been an immigrant twice: once when he moved from Ireland in 1949 to London, and again when he transfered to New York in 1975. Before breaking into art, he was a brick cleaner on a building site, a Christmas postman, a plasterer’s labourer and had a job stacking cardboard boxes in a factory. Fitting, perhaps, that stacks and bricklike forms would provide the building blocks for Scully’s inimitable visual language. 

In the 1970s, Scully’s paintings sought to fuse American Minimalism and Op Art, which culminated in ‘supergrids’, stripes and blocks of colour. By 1980, the artist was ‘at war’ with Minimalism and instead focussed on what he thought painting should be doing: concentrating on human nature.

When he moved to New York, he knew not everyone would be waiting with open arms. ‘I was welcomed by many; I was also un-welcomed by many,’ he says. ‘I had a lot of detractors in New York.’ Among his ‘defenders’, however, was the art critic Arthur Danto, who insisted that Scully belonged ‘on the shortest of the shortlists of major painters of our time.’ ‘If I got a bad review, he [Danto] would immediately write an incredible review in the New Statesman,’ he says. ‘His two favourite artists were me and Andy Warhol. I always found it bizarre because you couldn’t have two more uncomfortable bedfellows.’

Scully made a swift ascent to acclaim in the 1980s, resuscitating abstraction from self-destruction with bold paintings and a character to match. He began toying with different formats, including the introduction of panels directly inserted into canvases. In came Backs and Fronts (1981), an enormous multi-panelled composite of irregular heights, with gestural stripes careering in different directions like a jarring, psychedelic vision of a city skyline. The painting humanised geometry with hand-rendered stripes and ‘broke a lot of the rules my colleagues were still obeying’. The painting marked a watershed, both for Scully and the public’s perception of his work, paving the way for his formal yet liberated language of unbridled emotion and spirituality. 

Earlier this year, Scully’s insets turned uncharacteristically black. In his Dark Windows series, ominous panels rupture otherwise beguiling stripe paintings, described by the artist as ‘nihilistic and negative’. Scully painted these in direct response to Covid-19, a commentary on self-destruction, the ‘abuse of nature’ and mass uncertainty.

Scully’s approach to art is bolstered by an infectious, and seemingly infallible self-belief. And he doesn’t do creative block, apart from one ‘dreadful’ year after he graduated from university. ‘I made 25 paintings and destroyed them all, and the world is probably a better place for that,’ he says. That episode aside, Scully doesn’t have time for self-deprecation or ‘bellyaching’, a resilience he attributes to his grandmother, an Irish immigrant who, according to Scully, worked 18 hours a day, raised seven children and ‘never once complained.’

Scully’s paintings are rendered with force, exude force and leave the rest to be reckoned with. In footage of the artist at work, he appears to be in some form of rhythmic and spiritual combat with his paintings. ‘In my work, structure and emotion rage simultaneously, and that’s a very incongruous mixture,’ he says. ‘I am madly physical’, he says. ‘People say I’m exhausting.’ 

The artist makes a swift, impassioned pivot to politics, a subject he’s been long engaged in. In his teens, Scully made posters for the CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament]. He has also frequently taken aim at America’s gun culture and, in 2008, he designed billboards for the Obama campaign (one of his paintings boasts wall space in the Obamas’ house). More recently, he’s jumped on the Biden bandwagon, again, in the form of billboards. ‘For Hillary [Clinton], I thought she was going to win so easily I didn’t bother, but she lost. If Joe wins, this will prove that if when I put a billboard up, the person wins. It’s called narcissistic science,’ Scully quips.

Alongside his greatest hits in paint, Scully has demonstrated his aptitude in other media, translating his signature blocks, stripes and volumes into stone, steel, wood and glass. This is embodied in his current exhibition at Waldfrieden Sculpture Park in Wuppertal, Germany, an outdoor exhibition space founded by British artist and ‘old pal’ of Scully’s, Tony Cragg.

Scully’s show, ‘Insideoutside’ includes sculptures in steel, acrylic and copper, and an architectural tower of glass called Stack in conversation with his paintings. ‘The interesting thing about glass is it’s a wall you can see through. In a sense, it’s an object that’s not an object. It operates like a ghost or an angel between realms,’ he reflects. Consisting of eleven slabs of Murano glass, Stack looks as if Scully’s more vibrant painted units have dropped off the canvas, lost all opacity and re-stacked themselves in perfect order.

The artist shows no sign of sitting still. Alongside his Waldfrieden exhibition, he’s just signed with Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, and will have a show of new work in their space in Marais, Paris in Spring 2021. He’s also just unveiled a major retrospective at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, his first in Central Europe. ‘I’ve married into that country [Scully's wife, artist Liliane Tomasko is of Hungarian descent], so it has a special significance for them and me,’ he says. Titled ‘Passenger’, the show charts Scully’s career from his early experiments in the 1960s, through his musings with Minimalism to his recent, unexpected shift to figuration, and a great deal in between.

If a Rothko pierces the soul, a Scully will cradle it. His work fuses the cold, hard-edged rigidity of Minimalism with the warm fallibility of humanity, and has, in turn, reformed the very spirit of abstraction. But to what does he attribute his success? ‘I’m kind of clever, and I’m also free. If you put those two things together, you get something.’

INFORMATION

'Insideoutside', until 3 January 2021, Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden. skulpturenpark-waldfrieden.de

'Sean Scully: Passenger – A Retrospective', until 31 January 2021, The Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery. en.mng.hu

seanscullystudio.com