‘I can see now that I was looking for “feminist art”.’ So said the feminist critic and curator Lucy Lippard of her influential ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ show, staged at New York’s Fischbach Gallery in 1966. With the city’s art scene dominated by Minimalism and Conceptualism, Lippard’s exhibition marked a turning point in post-war sculpture by bringing together artists who worked with unconventional, often unstable, materials, including latex, rubber, foam, string, fibreglass, papier-mâché, netting, and wire. But of all the works on display, it was those by female artists – Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse – that drew the most interest from critics and the public. Through their shared commitment to experimentation, humour, and repetition, their art brought a renewed urgency to the unconscious and female eroticism. Now, The Courtauld gallery in London reunites their works for the first time since Lippard’s show.

For all the titillating promise of its title, ‘Abstract Erotic’ is not an exhibition explicitly about sexuality. Hesse famously spoke of ‘uckiness’ in her art, and these pieces deliver it in spades. If they verge on the grotesque, even the repellant, that’s precisely the point. Some of the latex here has weathered like rotting flesh. But as Mignon Nixon explains in her accompanying essay, Bourgeois’ Portrait (1963) – a congealed mass of burgundy latex lumps, ‘like some scabrous apron or placental lining’ – shows the medium’s capacity for transformation.

As a keen follower of Freudian psychoanalysis, Bourgeois most viscerally confronted bodiliness and its discontents through fleshy, entrail-like forms. Suspended from a meat hook, Fillette (Sweeter Version) (1968-99) resembles a mummified penis but remains anatomically and insistently ambiguous. Made from pigmented urethane rubber, it’s one of several bulging, drooping sculptures – Hesse’s bulbous paper and metal balls in nets are not to be missed – that skew more phallic. To balance this, the vitrine at the show’s entrance houses Bourgeois’ aptly named Tits (1967) alongside Adams’ woven steel cable structures that loop and twist over themselves. As Hesse said: ‘Endless repetition can be erotic.’

If Bourgeois used her repetitive drawings to ‘unearth memories’ – also on show downstairs from ‘Abstract Erotic’ – then Adams takes up abstraction to think through the gendered logics of architecture: presence, and what it means to make space for oneself. A scathing response to Manhattan’s redevelopment in the 1950s and 1960s, 22 Tangle (1964-68) is a reborn industrial object made from rusted steel cable, fluorescent paint and a scavenged chain-link fence. For Adams, bodies, like buildings, are sites of enclosure and shelter; both histories of containment and resistance. Although Threaded Grid (1964) and Threaded Drain Plate (1964) are made of much sturdier stuff than her early fibre works, they also gesture towards the domestic toil and drudgery of ‘women’s work’ in and out of the home.

Adams remains the least known of the trio, and while her inclusion here feels necessary, even urgent, her sculptures don’t always hold the same formal tension or psychic charge as those of Hesse or Bourgeois. Yet they are still well worth seeing, if only for the giant aluminium sculptures alone. Doubtless, the most arresting works are the most tactile, the most primordial. With her curation, Lippard wanted to ‘invite touch’; at the Courtauld, the response these sculptures summon might sit in that strange place between curious arousal and repulsion, but they are very tempting to touch indeed.

‘Abstract Erotic’, until 14 September 2025 at The Courtauld, courtauld.ac.uk

Twenty-five years after its opening, Tate Modern, London’s museum of modern and contemporary art on the Southbank, continues to captivate audiences. Renowned as one of the most engaging and accessible institutions of its kind, Tate Modern has redefined what an art museum can be in the 21st century.

This weekend (9-12 May), the museum is feting its 25th anniversary in style, with an epic Birthday Weekender of art, shopping, music and more. Here are the free exhibitions and events to check out at the Tate Modern this weekend.

See incredible artworks for free

The public can enjoy free installations and performances over the weekend. Louise Bourgeois' 10m-tall bronze spider sculpture, Maman, which welcomed the museum’s first visitors in May 2000, will return to the Turbine Hall, and Roman Ondak's interactive artwork, Measuring the Universe, invites visitors to mark their height on the Turbine Hall wall for an evolving exhibition.

A trail of 25 significant and symbolic artworks – both classics and new acquisitions – will guide visitors through the museum. Highlights include Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals, Dorothea Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, an immersive multi-screen film installation by Nalini Malani, and a series of live tarot readings staged as part of Meschac Gaba’s installation.

Tate Collective members aged 16-25, meanwhile, can gain free entry to all current Tate Modern exhibitions, including Leigh Bowery!, Electric Dreams, Anthony McCall: Solid Light, and The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh.

Two new free exhibitions have also opened in time for the museum’s birthday, reflecting its forward-looking commitment. ‘A Year in Art: 2050’ explores how artists have envisioned possible futures, while ‘Gathering Ground’ delves into the connections between contemporary art, land and community at a time of ecological crises.

Dance the night –and day– away

What's a party without incredible music? As part of the Birthday Weekender, the museum is inviting the public to attend a series of day and evening music performances.

Tonight, BBC Radio 1 DJ Jaguar and Romy will headline the Tanks. If you missed out, there's still plenty to see: Saturday, catch performances by Crystallmess, DAYTIMERS and Queer Bruk, as well as a headliner set by CULTURE FM in the museum's Tanks.

Sunday, beginning at noon, you can drop in as DJ House of Dad performs a chill afternoon set.

Indulge in retail therapy

Uniqlo, a long-time partner of the Tate, has just unveiled a special, pocket-size 'gift shop' on the museum's ground floor. Here you can find fashion and accessories inspired by works in the museum's collection, like t-shirts featuring an Andy Warhol self-portrait, Guerilla Girls' 1986 ‘Dearest Art Collector’ , and an illustration of the Tate itself by Peter Saville. The store also features fun customisation stations, where fashionistas can get their duds upgraded with bespoke embroidery.

Catch a talk

The Birthday Weekender will also encompass adjacent events, such as panel discussions with Tate Modern’s director, Karin Hindsbo; chief curator, Catherine Wood; as well as artists in the museum's Starr Cinema.

The museum will hold creative coding workshops, community conversations, and interactive Make Studios. You can also join Pop-up Ten Minute Talks; British Sign Language and audio description tours; and workshops by Kazvare Made in the Uniquo Tate Shop.

This summer, Rome’s world-famous Galleria Borghese brings key sculptures from Louise Bourgeois’ oeuvre into dialogue with the museum’s collection of ancient Roman art, Bernini and Canova sculptures, Caravaggio, Titian and Raphael paintings, and the villa’s own 17th-century grandeur. At the centre of the magnificent entrance hall, famous for its sumptuous Mariano Rossi ceiling fresco, stands an imposing metal cell by Bourgeois entitled The Last Climb. It is one of the artist’s last cells, created in 2008, just two years before her passing.

Here, themes of mortality and ascension to a heaven beyond come into dialogue with Rossi’s neoclassical motifs, while other objects in the sombre circular cell serve as a self-portrait: the artist salvaged the metal staircase spiralling towards the skies from her former Brooklyn studio. Meanwhile, the barely perceivable threads running across the cell and its blue glass orbs are a reference to her mother, and her parents’ tapestry business.

‘Louise Bourgeois: Unconscious Memories’

Entitled ‘Unconscious Memories’, it is the museum’s first exhibition dedicated to a contemporary female artist and the first show devoted to Bourgeois in Rome, despite the fact that the Italian capital played a key role in the sculptor’s artistic production. Louise Bourgeois first travelled to Italy in 1967. In letters sent to her husband, an art historian, she describes seeing the architectural wonders of the Palazzo Barberini staircases, and, of course, her visit to the museum at Galleria Borghese. ‘Six Berninis!’ she wrote. ‘For this show, we selected works that were either created in Italy or that have a deep connection with Italy,’ says Cloé Perrone, who conceived and co-curated the show.

After Bourgeois’ initial trip to Italy, she introduced marble into her sculptural practice, several of which are exhibited here. The sculpture Jambes Enclacée (1990), installed facing Canova’s 19th-century marble masterpiece portraying Paolina Borghese Bonaparte as Venus, reverses the gendered roles of artist and muse: here, Bourgeois cast the legs of her longtime assistant and close friend Jerry Gorovoy, who is the president of the Easton Foundation, set up by Bourgeois. In the adjacent Apollo and Daphne room, the sculpture Topiary (2005), delightfully blends botanical myths to evoke a delicate physical transformation from childhood to womanhood.

Bourgeois’ own childhood looms large in her sculptural body of work. Her parents’ restoration workshops, her mother’s untimely death, her sister’s disability, and her strict education are all worked into the monumental cell Passages Dangereux (1997), which occupies the grand loggia on the museum’s second floor.

Downstairs, soft sculptures of heads are installed amongst the marble busts of emperors, and Bernini’s towering Abduction of Proserpina. Bourgeois’ sculptures are made from scraps of precious tapestries and Gobelins from her parents’ shop. Some of the textures and motifs on the fabrics resemble the marble present all around them, on the floor, walls, and busts. Bourgeois’ heads – eyes and mouths wide open – appear almost non-human, their expressions minimal yet contemplative, alarmed, tormented even.

The tug and pull of hardness and softness, compassion and restraint are omnipresent, and coexist in her signature. A sculpture titled Janus Fleuri (1968) is installed in dialogue with works in the museum’s Hermaphrodite gallery. Male and female themes are simply and poignantly combined in the hanging bronze sculpture, its dual identity always in flux as the work rotates slightly, suspended from a metal lever.

It appears as if no exhibition of works by Bourgeois can be complete without a soaring spider sculpture, and this show is no exception. A 1996 bronze spider stands at the far end of the villa’s historical meridian garden, where a series of bronze sculptures cast from the artist’s and Jerry Gorovoy’s interlocked hands are installed along its path. Louise Bourgeois’ fingers appear aged, marked by arthritis and years of work with materials of all kinds. Hands that have authored seminal artworks and paved paths for other women artists.

‘Louise Bourgeois: Unconscious Memories’ is on view at the Galleria Borghese, Rome until 15 September 2024. The exhibition is produced in collaboration with The Easton Foundation and the Academy of France - Villa Medici with Fendi as its main sponsor

galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it

The mother is an apt figure for London’s Foundling Museum to consider: present, absent or suffocating, the mother’s role can spin a web of tendrils extending into love, sexuality and identity for her offspring.

It is a subject that has long fascinated artists including, notably, Louise Bourgeois, whose well-known spider image inspires the name of this exhibition, ‘The Mother and the Weaver’. Her work is the main focus in this curation from the Ursula Hauser collection, which unites over 40 pieces from women artists, encompassing Lorna Simpson, Rita Ackermann, Ida Applebroog, Sheila Hicks, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Maria Lassnig, Marlene Dumas, Sonia Gomes, Luchita Hurtado, Nicola L, Anna Maria Maiolino, Carol Rama, Pipilotti Rist, Amy Sherald, Sylvia Sleigh and Alina Szapocznikow. 

Here, curator Tanya Barson discusses the way artists have explored this dichotomy between the private and the public in the artists on show here.

Inside ‘The Mother and the Weaver’ at the Foundling Museum

Wallpaper*: How do you explore the multi-faceted role of the mother, absent or present, in this exhibition?

Tanya Barson: The exhibition aims to address the role and representation of the mother and motherhood in a very broad sense. It is a fundamental experience in life. While we don’t all experience being mothers, we all have mothers whether they are present in our lives or not. The artists in this exhibition address the spectrum of experience of our mothers and of being mothers. They tell us about their own deeply personal experiences, of motherhood, birth, their own childhood, or having children and their relationships to parenting and with their own parents, and they don’t sugar-coat it. They are candid about the messiness of life, about its complexities and the profound paradoxes that arise in our emotional lives. Society, and art history, have tended to portray motherhood in moral terms of black and white, of ideal motherhood and of failure and condemnation, while these artists express the grey areas.

W*: What was important to consider in the curation of the artists included here?

TB: I selected works by women artists from the Ursula Hauser Collection, which has a history of engaging with female perspectives – both of the artists, their subjects and the collector.

They have also been selected because of the way they address wider concerns with the representation of the female body, which is a related theme here, including modes of self-representation by female artists, or the complexities of gender identity. Underpinning the work is also an examination of the thematics of care – very much a priority across society as well as in the art context – leading to questions such as what does care entail; who cares for whom; and what are the experiences of care or its absence that define our lives? The artists have been chosen for their frankness about things such as anxiety, loss, dependence, ambivalence, vulnerability and, conversely, strength, love and resilience.

What’s important in this group of artists is that they address complex or difficult aspects of human experience non-verbally, and yet in ways that are themselves complex and multi-layered. That is to say, without closing down the possibilities but opening up to a range of responses. The museum is a complex and emotive space and its many different audiences and visitors should be able to experience these extraordinary artworks on their own terms. The fact that artists use their own individual languages means that each viewer can encounter them without needing translation. They speak for themselves.

W*: What can visitors look forward to from this exhibition?

TB: The exhibition includes a selection of exceptional works by artists of the first order. Works that are in turns fierce or timid, full of sorrow or hope, pain or joy. Some of the artists are widely acclaimed, while others may be discoveries to the visitors. What is perhaps most special is to view these works in dialogue with the museum, its collection, its history and the setting it affords.

‘The Mother & The Weaver: Art from the Ursula Hauser Collection’ at the Foundling Museum until 18 February 2024

foundlingmuseum.org.uk

‘I’m always quite sensitive to the past while feeling more detached in the present,’ says Irish fashion designer Simone Rocha, one of three protagonists of a new fashion exhibition at MoMu Antwerp which explores the emotional link between fashion and memory – what meaning do we attach to the clothes we wear, and why? And how does clothing shape the way that we remember the past? Of her own works – several of which have recently been acquired by the institution, having reopened after a major renovation in 2021 – Rocha says the idea of memory is woven into every garment. ’History, nostalgia, remorse, emotion... I pull those ideas into the reality of today and see how they reveal themselves.’

Titled ‘Echo. Wrapped in Memory’, the recently opened exhibition places Rocha in conversation with two other women artists, Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and prolific French sculptor and painter Louise Bourgeois. MoMu calls it a ‘conversation’ between the three women, who despite working across mediums and time periods, nonetheless share a fascination with clothing, fabric and the body, and the way that interplay shapes the way we understand our personal histories. Alongside, MoMu has selected a number of historical pieces from its vast archive – now numbering over 38,000 pieces – which bear marks of their wearer’s lives, whether stains, smells, or tears (one extraordinary weighted satin silk bodice from the late 18th century is eerily shredded across its surface).

‘Echo. Wrapped in Memory’ fashion exhibition at MoMu Antwerp

Bourgeois – who described art as ‘the re-experience of a trauma’ – clothing became a particularly important part of her practice in the final two decades of her life, whereby she would incorporate items she had owned and worn into her sculptural works. Fabric was a lifelong fascination for the artist (her parents were tapestry restorers in France), and often became a metaphor for the psychoanalytic process which would come to define her oeuvre, the process of stitching and weaving associated with a desire to mend the past. ‘I have always had a fascination with the magic power of the needle,’ she once said. ‘The needle is used to repair the damage. It's a claim to forgiveness.’

One such work by Bourgeois, titled ‘Blue Days’ (1996) – on display in Europe for the first time – features in the exhibition and comprises a number of pieces of the artist’s clothing, all blue, hanging from an industrial metal armature (she also created a corresponding work called ‘Pink Days’, suggesting the traditionally gendered clothing children are given at birth; when displayed, they are to retain the natural creases of the garments). ’It gives me great pleasure to hold on to my clothes, my dresses, my stockings, I have never thrown away a pair of shoes of mine in 20 years,’ Bourgeois wrote in 1963. ‘The pretext is that they are still good – it’s my past and as rotten as it was, I would like to take it and hold it tight in my arms.’ 

Both Rocha and De Keersmaeker note an affinity with Bourgeois, who died aged 98 in New York in 2010. Rocha first encountered Bourgeois aged 16 at IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) – ‘hanging bodies in the terry-cloth towelling fabrics suspended from the ceiling’ – while De Keersmaeker remembers various encounters, including exhibitions at Palais de Papes in Avignon and Dia New York. ’As a female artist, her work speaks to me – as a choreographer and as a woman,’ she tells Wallpaper*. ‘I admire her lonely trajectory, if you will, how she stubbornly went her own way.’

An admiration is also shared between Rocha and De Keersmaeker, who had previously planned to collaborate before Rocha became pregnant with her first daughter. ‘It is very fitting we are finally together in this show, sharing works which reflect memories and mothering,’ says Rocha, referencing the various archival pieces which recall motherhood in the exhibition – like a series of 18th-century pregnancy corsets. ‘I’ve always admired her work, her brain, her influence.’

‘I met Simone about ten years ago. Rosas [De Keersmaeker’s dance company] is regularly invited to perform in London and when we were working on Work/Travail/ Arbeid at the Tate Modern, curator Chris Dercon suggested getting in touch with her,’ adds De Keersmaeker. ‘Looking into her work, I was very much inspired by the unique way in which she approaches clothing, fashion, and narrative. At a certain moment, we considered collaborating on Così fan tutte, a performance I created for the Paris Opera in 2017. The timing wasn’t right. But we did stay in touch and met again on different occasions: I did a photo shoot in her clothing, and Simone came to see our shows in London. I follow her work, and she follows mine.’

‘Memory has a very particular meaning when one works in dance,’ she continues. ‘Dance is ephemeral. We are continuously confronted with the question of traces: is it necessary for our work to leave traces, or do we accept the ephemeral aspect of dance? In dance, the body is a tool but it is also at the core of our identity, and clothes are literally close to the body... the practice of dancing is thinking about time, dealing with time.’

Archival footage of De Keersmaeker’s choreography sits alongside works from Rocha and Bourgeois, as well as a slew of other pieces exploring the idea of memory – including contributions from artists including Cassi Namoda, Laila Gohar and Liz Magor, alongside designers Raf Simons, Helmut Lang and Dries Van Noten. ’The invitation was unexpected, but it inspired me to revisit my trajectory as a choreographer as well as the Rosas repertory from a completely different perspective, [which was] extremely stimulating,’ she says. ’The relationship between the body and memory, between the body and clothing – it is such a beautiful and thought-provoking idea.’

‘Echo. Wrapped in Memory’ runs from 14 October 2023 until 25 February 2024 at MoMu - Fashion Museum Antwerp.

momu.be

Left, Reka Nyari, Pussy, signed and numbered 1/7, chromatic print on silver paper. Executed in 2012, this work is number 1 from an edition of 7. Provenance: the artist. Right, Penny Slinger, Homage to Lawrence Durrell, painted wax life cast, in 2 parts. Executed in 1973. Provenance: the artist

A playful and provocative look at female sexuality is the focus of a Sotheby’s selling exhibition. ‘A Woman’s Right to Pleasure’, created in collaboration with BlackBook and inspired by the tome of the same name, traces female experience over the last century in a reframing of traditional narratives.

Sexuality is viewed through the lens of female artists, with works from the likes of Nan Goldin, Penny Slinger, Reka Nyari, Tracey Emin, Judy Chicago, Jenny Holzer, Marilyn Minter, Betty Tompkins, Alexandra Rubinstein and Louise Bourgeois presenting women’s sexuality through a plethora of mediums. Artworks, encompassing prints, photography, oil paintings and neon, riff on both traditional and contemporary multimedia.

Pieces consider both classical motifs and cheeky double entendres, from Reka Nyari’s Pussy print, which intertwines the linguistic and the sexual, to Penny Slinger’s rethinking of everyday motifs. With a slight shift in perspective, domestic objects – long symbols of women’s repression – become markers for female pleasure.

Judy Chicago celebrates the tactility of unexpected materials with Submerged/Emerged #1, which draws sensual silhouettes in acrylic spray on pressed and moulded cast paper, while Sophia Wallace’s Άδάμας (Unconquerable) is a sculptural celebration of femininity in wood, fibreglass, steel and enamel.

Jewellery is also included, with Indian brand Studio Renn presenting six pieces from the ‘Seed-Leaf’ collection, which will debut at the exhibition, representing the cyclical nature of fertility and abundance in gold and precious stones.

The book that lends its name to the exhibition was released in 2020, and featured artists’ works alongside essays from Erica Jong and Roxane Gay. There is photography by both established and emerging names, including Cindy Sherman, Marilyn Minter, Carrie Mae Weems, Harley Weir, Mickalene Thomas and Martine Gutierrez, while written contributions from Erika Lust, Stoya, Alice Little, Vaginal Davis, Naana Otoo-Oyortey, Dani Lessnau, Natasha Stagg and Pussy Riot's Nadya Tolokonnikova muse on the links between pleasure and empowerment.

Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City. Signed, titled, dated and numbered AP4 in ink on an accompanying label cibachrome print, flush-mounted. Executed in 1983. Provenance: the artist

Louise Bourgeois, House Struck By a Lightning Bolt. Signed with the artist’s initials; titled and variously inscribed on the reverse. Ink, graphite, whiteout and gouache on paper. Executed in 1998. Provenace: acquired by the present owner at Wright Auction, Chicago, April 27, 2010

INFORMATION

‘BlackBook Presents: A Woman’s Right to Pleasure’, 8 July – 12 August, Sotheby’s LA

sothebys.com

The idea for an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’ work curated by Jenny Holzer had been in process for some time before the puzzle pieces came together. But the Kunstmuseum Basel began to work in earnest with Holzer and the Eastern Foundation, Bourgeois’ estate, and at long last, this potent meeting of creative minds is a reality.

In ‘The Violence of Handwriting Across a Page’ Holzer curates selected excerpts of Bourgeois’ notes and writings alongside her artwork in a huge exhibition that spans sculpture, installation, works on paper and textile art. Tying these elements together captures the essence of Bourgeois as an artist, a person deep, forceful, outspoken and uncompromising.

‘I was invited to her house, and I had the luxury of spending an extended period of time with her, where I could look at, for example, a red wax ear of what appeared to be a demon sitting on the table beside us, and to have [an] extended, unselfconscious, absolutely sincere conversation about how to make the colour blue work,’ Holzer recalled of their first meeting.

Holzer, who knew the legendary late French artist when they both lived in New York, always held great respect for her work and achievements. Combining this with an intrinsic boldness and understanding of the impact of language, Holzer brought together the text selected for the exhibition alongside works created throughout Bourgeois’ prolific career. 

‘We went deep into the writing. She worked incessantly on her art, and wrote when she couldn't sleep, so we had a treasure trove,’ said Holzer, who brought in a team of readers to get as deep an understanding as possible of the artist’s notebooks.

Holzer’s clean, precise type only serves to emphasise the visceral fury, blood, sex and humour in Bourgeois’ words and works, in projections that cover the façades of three locations in the city at night – Kunstmuseum Basel, City Hall, and the Old University on the Rheinsprung. Inside the museum, the works tap into Bourgeois’ comfort with extreme thoughts and emotions. Her drawings and textile works bear phrases such as ‘The Rage to Know’ and ‘I am afraid therefore I live’. You can also experience these through an augmented reality app and Instagram filter. 

‘As they say in Brooklyn, she was not playing,’ said Holzer. ‘Although she did have a wonderful sense of humour [and] a sense of adventure, she was utterly serious, dead serious about what she attempted and she would try again, again and again, to get it right. Unlike many artists, she often did.’

In studying Bourgeois’ notes – a task Holzer says she could never have done while Bourgeois was alive – she was able to see where words and ideas translated into sculpture and drawing. Shown in Europe for the first time is the mechanised work Twosome, 1991, which links the old museum, the Hauptbau, to the contemporary wing, the Neubau via an underground passage. This takes you to four works by Bourgeois, in dialogue with the medieval to post-impressionist collection including pieces by Holbein and Cézanne. 

Holzer’s take on Borgouis is a celebration of this inimitable artist. From an air of levity as you hear her singing in the museum lifts and bathrooms to her unwavering fearlessness and ability to confront the most unruly facets of humanity, this work hits you with its complexity in a manner impossible to misinterpret. ‘She was enormously intelligent,’ said Holzer. ‘She was distressed, she was determined, she had incredible range, she was obsessive, she was furious, she would have a giggle from time to time and I will have to resort to the word infinite again. She was infinite.’

INFORMATION

Louise Bourgeois x Jenny Holzer: 'The Violence of Handwriting Across a Page', until 15 May 2022, Kunstmuseum Basel. kunstmuseumbasel.ch

Understanding Louise Bourgeois message is often a challenge, even when the work itself is monumental and unforgettable. Surely this cannot be so of her dish of garlic-infused lamb?

Ingredients (serves 10 – 12)
A 5.5kg leg of lamb
1.5 heads of garlic divided into 25 to 30 cloves
5 tbsp thyme
6 bay leaves
turnips, peeled
carrots, peeled
parsnips, peeled
white radishes, cleaned with ends cut
red radishes
sweet potatoes or potatoes
apples

Method
Preheat oven to 260C. Insert each clove of garlic at least 2 inches deep into lamb with the point of a paring knife. Take care that garlic is evenly distributed. Cover lamb with thyme and then add bay leaves. Place in roasting pan and brown in oven for 15 to 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 190C and place vegetables around lamb. Roast for 1 hour 45 minutes, or 12 minutes to 500g for pink French lamb. Let rest before carving.

Note: This is a recipe for garlic lovers. Louise uses the whole leg of lamb. If lamb weighs more than 5.5kg increase garlic, thyme, bay leaves, and roasting time proportionately. Different combinations of vegetables are used depending on the season. Louise adds a green salad and red wine to complete the buffet style dinner.

Ursula Hauser is a woman of devotion. Hailing from Gossaul in eastern Switzerland, she has moved house only ‘two or three’ times in her life, and always within the canton of St Gallen. For the past 35 years, the co-founder of Hauser & Wirth – which she established in 1992 with her daughter Manuela Wirth, and son-in-law Iwan – has been living in a Bauhaus building near Uzwil on the river Thur, quietly amassing a private collection of late 20th-century modern masters and contemporary art with a strong female bent.

Coinciding with her 80th birthday, a new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Somerset presents works by 11 women artists from the self-made retail magnate’s ‘deeply personal’ collection, among them Louise Bourgeois, Heidi Bucher, Sonia Gomes, Maria Lassnig, Lee Lozano, Meret Oppenheim, and Alina Szapocznikow. Curated by Manuela together with Laura Bechter, curator of the Ursula Hauser Collection, the survey ‘Unconscious Landscape’ explores the long-lasting relationships Hauser formed with these artists, and the challenging – and at times disturbing – works that shape her daring collection.

The gentle-spoken Swiss art maven did not always bear a charmed life. Hauser was born in 1939, three weeks before the Second World War broke out. Her mother was a professional seamstress, while her father was serving in the army as a driver to high-ranking officials. Hauser’s entrance into the world was fraught, surviving a threatening case of pneumonia at six months old during a time before antibiotics and penicillin existed.

At 19 she became engaged to Albert Hauser, and was married in 1961, at 22 years old. Her husband died unexpectedly following a short illness in 1973, leaving to her raise three young children – Manuela, the oldest, was just ten. After his death, Hauser took over his role in the rental-purchasing business he had established with her father, and went on to build a Swiss wholesale business empire with her family that included household appliances and electronics brand Fust.

It’s little wonder then, that existential issues of birth, death, motherhood, loss, and longing punctuate many of the works in Hauser’s collection – an ‘unconscious’ reflection of her own personal trajectory, as the exhibition title suggests. The ‘most profound moment’ in her mother’s life as a collector, notes Manuela, came after her first visit to Bourgeois’ Brooklyn studio. Hauser had encountered the late French-American artist’s work at the 1993 Venice Biennale and her work Legs (1986) – the final work on display in Somerset – remains a prominent fixture in the collector’s home today. It’s only fitting that Bourgeois works open and close the exhibition: a subset of her Cell series hold court with Maria Lassnig’s visceral paintings in the Threshing Barn.

Elsewhere in the Rhoades Gallery, a steel Bourgeois spider looming imposingly over Lozano paintings from the artist’s Tool Paintings series among other works by Carol Rama and Alina Szapocnikow. ‘For people of my generation, it was impossible to let on that you were vulnerable,’ Hauser tells Bechter in The Inner Mirror, a book of interviews with the art collector published to coincide with the UK exhibition. ‘You would never reveal the reflections on your inner mirror. That was a sign of weakness and then you have been lost. And that is exactly what Louise’s work shows. Her art creates a space where that can be expressed.’ (Bourgeois’ eponymous late-1960s bronze sculpture, Unconscious Landscape, also lends its name to the exhibition).

One gallery in the Carmody Groarke-designed exhibition is devoted to a solo presentation of realist paintings by Sylvia Sleigh, with whom Hauser forged a bond during her visits to New York, where the Welsh-born artist resided from the early 1960s. Following Sleigh’s death in 2010, Hauser purchased the house she had so often visited, restoring many of its original features and preserving the once-overlooked artist’s legacy by installing her paintings. The final room in the exhibition focus on textile-based works, from a constellation of Sheila Hicks’ vibrant ‘memory’ bundles, to mixed media works by Carol Rama and rarely exhibited reliefs by Eva Hesse.

The Somerset show comes at a watershed moment. Jenny Saville set an auction record for the most expensive living female artist in 2018, after an eight-way bidding war at Sotheby’s propelled the final price to $12.4m. Earlier this month, art dealer Robert E Mnuchin paid $91.1m for Jeff Koons’ stainless steel sculpture Rabbit at Christie’s. Consider the artists who round out the five highest sums fetched by living artists at auction: David Hockney (Portrait of an Artist, $90.3m), Koons again (Ballon Dog (Orange), $58.4m), Gerhard Richter (Abstraktes Bild, $46m), and Cui Ruzhuo (The Grand Snowing Mountains, $39.6m). In 2019, the gender ‘gap’ could only be described as a chasm in the art world. 

But Hauser was collecting the work of women artists long before the debate on gender disparity or the #MeToo movement dictated the art market, and as this all-female exhibition resoundingly demonstrates, is that they are able to match their male counterparts, in every sense. Hauser’s first work of art – purchased for 800 francs by an 18-year-old Hauser still studying textiles – was a fired clay sculpture by Rhine Valley artist Meinrad Zünd. It depicts the negative and positive of two people – ‘when you fold them together, they become a couple, a couple in harmony’. In a similar vein, the Ursula Hauser Collection is dark, though not necessarily cynical; feminist, but not didactic; risky, but not aimless – a thought-provoking collection of two sides, folded together in harmony.

Per Kirkeby’s Brick Labyrinth has cropped up at Château la Coste, joining its extensive collection of works by Tadao Ando, Jean Nouvel, Richard Serra, Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois. Hidden in the depths of the splendid property situated a stone’s throw from Aix-en-Provence, among oaks and vineyards (the Domaine is as well known for its wine as it is for its art), this is the Danish-born artist’s very last completed sculpture: he died in May this year, shortly before his installation was complete.

Kirkeby first visited Château La Coste in 2006, as part of a trip to Paul Cézanne’s homeland in the south of France, and immediately started laying the foundations for a project at the property, which would include a temporary exhibition as well as this permanent sculpture. With Brick Labyrinth, he took inspiration from European romanticism, turning the labyrinth into a tower with two basic interior spaces.

References to Donald Judd’s minimalism and to Mayan art and architecture are nonetheless evident – Kirkeby conceived his first brick sculpture in 1973 after traveling to Central America – as is a little homage to Provence through his choice of slender, bright red, archetypically Mediterranean bricks.

Original sketches and notes for Brick Labyrinth are visible to visitors of the Domaine at the entrance of ‘Matter is Light’, the temporary exhibition curated by the Château La Coste team and Kirkeby’s longtime gallerist, Michael Werner. In a pristine space occupying an old winery, next to Ando’s Centre d’Art, a selection of rarely-shown paintings dating between 2008 and 2014 is accompanied by sculptures from the 1980s. Not geometrical brick ones this time, but rather organically-shaped bronze pieces which, at some angles, appear to reveal human or animal profiles.

Kirkeby’s obsession with geology (dating back to his early years as a young geology graduate working between the Danish mainland and Greenland) is visible in almost every piece, from the sculptures mimicking the stratified volcanic rocks of the north to the large-scale paintings, featuring his trademark bright pops of colour in the midst of rich, woodland-inspired shades.

‘People think I’m a colourist, but I have tried to refute the idea that colours are pretty for years. Actually, it’s quite the opposite: they mean something, they have a property. One which is often difficult to make out,’ said the artist in a 2014 interview discussing gravity and grace, before adding: ‘beauty is not enough. There must be something more, a structure. You must commit yourself, and risk everything, sacrifice the good, and go through a process of recognition until something better is created, built upon the ruins of the original idea.’

INFORMATION

‘Per Kirkeby: Matter is Light’ is on view until 21 January 2019. For more information, visit the Château La Coste website and the Michael Werner Gallery website

ADDRESS

Château La Coste
2750 Route De La Cride
13610 Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade

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This month marks Wallpaper’s coming of age: our 21st anniversary. It’s also my tenth year as editor-in-chief, having switched from being creative director in April 2007. I must confess that my coming of age came a number of years earlier. Time flies.

One of the earliest projects I worked on in my new role was our inaugural October Guest Editors’ Issue. Now, many media outlets have given over their editorial reins to appropriate talents in order to bring a fresh perspective and generate some PR buzz. But because of Wallpaper’s multi-faceted editorial remit, we felt our spin on the concept should be equally all-encompassing – we would invite not just one, but up to three diverse creatives each year who would reflect our offering, but also push us to try new things.

So year one saw a purist industrial designer, Dieter Rams, an iconoclastic artist, Jeff Koons, and a much-more-than-a-fashion-designer fashion designer, Hedi Slimane. To rebalance the unintentional male bias for 2007, the next year saw Louise Bourgeois, Zaha Hadid and Rei Kawakubo bring art, architecture, and fashion girl power to our pages. Subsequent editions have seen Karl Lagerfeld, Philippe Starck, David Lynch, Robert Wilson, Kraftwerk, Christian Marclay, Lang Lang, Ole Scheeren, Taryn Simon, Laurie Simmons, Elmgreen & Dragset, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, William Wegman and Liz Diller have fun at our expense. That makes 21 in total, and therefore a convenient excuse to take a retrospective look, as well as request some updates for our latest issue. (Our thickest issue yet, the spine also happens to measure a serendipitous 21mm)

In addition to a 20-plus page section within the magazine, each of our Guest Editors was also invited to design a cover. Many called for unusual paper technologies – Hedi used specialist printing inks to simulate glitter, whereas Karl invited readers to strip the Dior Homme suit off his muse by means of a peelable layer. Starck constructed a transparent front cover using three layers of tracing paper. And Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter tacked on a pair of 3D specs, to go with his 3D cover portrait and portfolio of exclusive images tied to key Kraftwerk compositions.

If I had to pick one favourite project it would be Zaha’s. Her cover was a gatefold construction using multiple die-cuts, while inside she produced a 16-page die-cut sculpture, which was a take on her ‘Lotus’ room installation at that year’s Venice Biennale. ‘I want to put a big hole in the magazine’, she told us. We dutifully obliged.

Zaha was profiled by art critic Matthew Collings, who visited her at her London offices and provided a pleasant distraction from discussions about cement. Collings and ‘Big Z’, as he affectionately called her, hit it off immediately. ‘Her architecture is the greatest art of the moment,’ he said.

So it’s a huge pleasure for me and I think a fitting tribute to Zaha (who tragically passed away 18 months ago) that this anniversary issue’s cover was created by Zaha Hadid Architects and its principal and torchbearer, Patrik Schumacher.

Enjoy this special issue and raise a glass to Big Z.

Tony Chambers, Editor-in-Chief

As originally featured in the October 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*223)

Our thickest issue yet, the spine also happens to measure a serendipitous 21mm, in keeping with our celebration of 21 years, and 21 guest editors

INFORMATION

The October 2017 issue of Wallpaper* is out now. Subscribe here

This week presents a last chance to see Hauser & Wirth’s blinder of an artist-jewellery show at its New York outpost. Curated by the former model and London-based jewellery designer Celia Forner, The Portable Art Project is a moveable design feast of ‘wearable objects’ by 15 commissioned artists.

From Phyllida Barlow to Bharti Kher and John Baldessari, the show’s dynamism has much to do with the fact that all are currently practising artists, except Louise Bourgeois. In fact it is the asymmetric pair of silver and gold spiral cuffs Bourgeois created for the project in 2008 that is the pivot of the exhibition. These bold rope-like jewels are also central to the show’s success, being at once sensuous, covetable and wearable.

The notion of jewellery as fine art has long been a cloudy topic. But artist jewellery – pieces created for galleries by named artists – is not quite the same as art jewellery. The latter has emerged from the former as a genre generally dedicated to exploring unusual methods and humble materials, often with a socio-political bent in the Arte Povera mold. The movement gained momentum in the US in the 1950s and 60s and is often relegated to the applied arts category – or craft. As in, not as important as art.

It remains a limbo genre, due in part to the art jewellery community’s tendency to over intellectualise and add meaning. Yet, from Picasso and Ernst to Hirst and Koons, fine artists have long been happily sidetracked from canvas and bronze to the odd spot of jewellery design. This Hauser & Wirth addition to the genre bridges the gap with humour and, despite its own slight tendency towards academic worth – the pieces are billed as existing ‘somewhere between sculpture and bodily adornment’ – reveals artist jewellery as simply great design.

Whether it’s art or craft is surely not the point. And can artist jewellery really be ‘a personal connection’ between artist and wearer? Perhaps the answer is best left to the lucky owners. What this show does highlight is that artists make great jewellery because they seem to grasp that, ultimately, it is design to be worn. Hats off to Forner, whose canny collective so eloquently displays this oft-forgotten factor.

INFORMATION

‘Portable Art: A Project by Celia Forner’ is on view until 17 June. For more information, visit the Hauser & Wirth website

ADDRESS

Hauser & Wirth
32 East 69th Street
New York

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

For the landmark 'Entangled: Threads and Making' exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Karen Wright played the double-role of curator, and 'international artist matchmaker'. She brought together a diverse group of over 40 female artists, many of whom desccended on the seaside resort of Margate for the weeks surrounding the exhibition's opening. Together, they occupied the bars and cafes once frequented by the likes of JMW Turner, and more recently, Tracey Emin. 'One evening, when they had all left, I went to the local pub on my own,' Wright explains, 'and the barman asked where all my interesting friends had gone. It was quite lonely!'

The artistic community Wright has helped foster is clearly felt when entering the David Chipperfield-designed museum, where friendliness abounds. Works in the entrance and upstairs loby (The Three Graces by Kashif Nadim Chaudry, and Knot Project by Anna Ray, both from 2016) have been handmade by local volunteers. What's more, no less than three school groups were wandering around the small museum when Wallpaper* visited, which made for a noisy, but intensely encouraging trip.

Wright's show focuses on textiles in post-1940s female art. On paper, it doesn't seem like a groundbreaking concept. After all, women have been using a needle and thread since they were invented. On looking round, the curation's bravery and progressive attitude jumps off the walls. But it has not been met without controversy. Margate local (and Turner Contemporary benefactor) Emin is notably absent from the group, which has been a particular sticking point for some critics, Wright explains. 'She's an artist who has had so much coverage already. This exhibition was about bringing together more up and coming names.'

Artists like Anna Ray, Karla Black and Laura Ford, whose 2012 Penguins sculptures provide another political texture to the already statement-making exhibition. Huddled in the back corner of the gallery, Ford describes these shifty looking characters as 'sculptures dressed up as animals which are dressed up as people'. In their many guises, they comment on global warming, youth culture and materiality, with a rare sense of humour.

This focus on emerging talent doesn't mean the exhibition lacks 'big ticket' works. Anni Albers' structural, taughtly-woven silk tapestry (designed in 1926) stands as an important juxtaposition to its later counterparts, like Ann Cathrin November Høibo's Untitled (Diptych) created specifically for the show, where threads colourfully explode, pull and unravel from their constraints. Elsewhere, Louise Bourgeois' profound bra clasp sculpture promises to be the smallest object that will ever halt you in your tracks.

It feels like an over-used phrase at the moment, but this exhibition couldn't have come at a better time. Despite this, Wright has been persuing the exhibition in various forms for the best part of a decade. 'Let's be honest, women have always had a bad deal, and there's no way I could have planned this to happen when it did,' she reasons. But as hand-knitted pink pussy hats dance across the world's major cities, the needle and thread are becoming tools of rebellion, reimagined as contemporary symbols of female unity; an idea solidified by Wright's international, welcoming and progressive showcase.

INFORMATION
’Entangled: Threads and Making’ is on view until 7 May. For more information visit the Turner Contemporary website

ADDRESS

Turner Contemporary
Rendezvous
Margate
Kent CT9 1HG

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At the time of Louise Bourgeois’ death in May 2010 a question mark hung over where one of the artist’s largest, most ambitious works would end up. I Do, I Undo, I Redo, an installation consisting of three 9m-tall steel towers that visitors could climb, created for the inaugural Tate Modern Turbine Hall exhibition exactly a decade earlier, had been packed away in storage since it was taken down.

In the year before Bourgeois’ death, Irish property developer and businessman Patrick McKillen went to visit her in New York to propose transporting the towers to her native France and installing them at McKillen’s 600-acre estate Château La Coste, an organic winery and expansive art and architecture park in the heart of Provence.

McKillen was already well acquainted with Bourgeois’ long-time assistant Jerry Gorovoy, having bought a Crouching Spider – the first in a series of six and the only one in France – for Château La Coste some years earlier. You are greeted by the giant arachnoid sculpture rising from the reflecting pool in front of the Tadao Ando-designed Art Centre (housing the main reception and a restaurant) when you first enter the estate, which McKillen opened to the public in 2011. It was McKillen’s radical idea of installing the piece on the water that sold the deal to Bourgeois. Given she had been so happy with the idea, McKillen felt empowered to suggest another.

‘I was in New York for a friend’s 50th birthday,’ recalls McKillen. ‘I called Jerry to ask whether I could pop by and see him to buy a print for my friend and, while I was there, I asked him what had happened to those Tate towers. He told me they were in storage and that Louise wanted them to go to a museum, but it was unlikely any museum would be able to display them permanently. I suggested bringing them to France and installing them at La Coste,’ he continues. ‘Jerry liked the idea, but he didn’t think there was any chance of it happening.’

McKillen, collaborative by nature, called French architect Jean Nouvel and asked him to propose an environment to house the towers. Nouvel has been involved with Château La Coste since McKillen bought the property in 2002; he originally advised on a master plan for the estate and designed the pair of high-tech cylindrical steel chai de vinification buildings, unveiled in 2008. Nouvel’s idea was ambitious – to excavate an area of hillside high up on the estate overlooking the Puy-Sainte-Réparade valley and rebuild the shape of the hill over the top of the Bourgeois towers with an undulating concrete roof. It will be a feat of engineering when complete. A few months passed after Nouvel’s proposition was sent to Bourgeois and then Gorovoy got in touch to say she was very keen on the idea. ‘Jean was literally on the next flight to see her,’ says McKillen. ‘That encounter was filmed. Louise was very frail, but she lit up talking to Jean about the idea.’

Bourgeois died before the deal to bring I Do, I Undo, I Redo to La Coste was sealed. ‘After that, Jerry thought the estate would want it to go to the highest bidder, which meant it was way out of my reach,’ says McKillen. It was only after Bourgeois’ children saw the footage of their mother talking to Nouvel about the project, some months later, that Gorovoy called McKillen to tell him they had changed their minds.

Patrick McKillen – Paddy to his friends – is recounting this story sitting at what will be any art and food aficionado’s most coveted dining table. It is an intimate setting directly under another Bourgeois work McKillen acquired for La Coste, The Couple, 2007-2009. The polished aluminium piece hangs in the centre of a glass pavilion that echoes Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut. Designed with The Couple in mind, it will house the fine dining restaurant at the new Villa La Coste, a luxury hotel launching on the Château La Coste estate comprising 28 villas. The hotel has been under construction for the duration of 2016 and is located close to the site that Nouvel earmarked for the towers, which are halfway through being installed. At present, hotel guests will get a unique view of Bourgeois’ I Do, I Undo, I Redo before the hill-shaped roof goes in next year.

Gérald Passédat will be at the helm of the Pavilion restaurant. It will be the first restaurant outside Marseille for the Michelin-starred chef, who owns the clifftop hotel Le Petit Nice. Passédat is celebrated for cooking inspired by the sea, but at the Pavilion he will follow in the spirit of La Coste – as the architects and artists invited to create installations do – and take inspiration from the Provençal countryside. ‘It is something different for me,’ says Passédat. ‘Rather than looking out to sea, I am searching for the finest ingredients from the land. It is going to be unique.’ McKillen conceived the design of Villa La Coste in collaboration with his in-house architects and the Marseille-based Irish architect Christopher Green. 

It is a simple, clean, elongated silhouette that blends discreetly into the landscape. Looking up from the Tadao Ando Art Centre, you could easily mistake the convex stone facade of Villa La Coste for another pavilion or site-specific installation. André Fu was appointed to work on specific interior elements – the spa, the bar, the library and the Pavilion restaurant. ‘It is a remarkable project to be part of,’ says Fu. ‘Château La Coste is home to projects from the likes of Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and Renzo Piano. Paddy has access to just about any architect in the world. It is a huge privilege to be here. ‘La Coste has a very special atmosphere,’ Fu adds. 

‘I have responded to that, as well as the vision Paddy has for this hotel to be an extension of the general lifestyle at Château La Coste. A key thing is the sense of intimacy, which escalates into what I describe as a sense of relaxed luxury. It is about designing places around people and not just designing spaces purely for the spectacle.’

The hotel’s ‘villas’ – each sizeable suites – are arranged along a shaded avenue, with thyme and mint growing at ground level and jasmine climbing. All have a walled-in courtyard and those located on the upper part of the building have private plunge pools and breathtaking views of the Luberon. The lobby is halfway along what McKillen has named ‘the street’ and on entering it looks spectacular, but feels informal. McKillen is keen for barriers between guests and staff to be broken. Before he drove us up to the hotel, he stopped at the main entrance to the estate to make this point. There is no buzzer, no gate – simply two slabs of concrete that Tadao Ando conceived either side of the road. ‘I don’t want physical barriers between us and our visitors,’ says McKillen. ‘You will notice there are hardly any signs around the estate either. I want our guests to feel comfortable taking in the environment at their own pace.’

A new road has been laid to take guests up the hill to Villa La Coste; it winds past the property’s Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Vermentino vineyards (the estate produces some of the region’s finest organic wines through biodynamic practice). Look left on the way up and you’ll see Frank Gehry’s wooden and glass music pavilion, commissioned for the Serpentine Galleries but funded by and intended for Château La Coste. The estate undertakes outreach work with local schools, inviting them to use the pavilion for performances and lectures, and impromptu concerts by visitors often take place here. Look right on the way up and you can make out the path to Paul (grandson of Henri) Matisse’s aluminium Meditation Bell.

There is a more scenic walking route through the forest, where you pass Sean Scully’s stacked stone sculpture, weave through Richard Serra’s steel sheets and have the option of wandering further to take in Liam Gillick’s moving coloured screens, Lee Ufan’s chapel-like space, Andy Goldsworthy’s giant nest and the only architectural installation Tracey Emin has ever produced: an elevated wooden walkway leading to a wine barrel containing a ghostly porcelain cat. 

Once you arrive at the hotel you are surrounded by artworks from McKillen’s personal collection. On one wall in the lobby, pages from Bourgeois’ embroidered fabric book Ode à la Bièvre hang above a Charlotte Perriand table, with a Ron Arad ‘Rover’ chair to the side of it. The room’s centrepiece is a banquet-size wooden table by Nouvel with a polished stainless steel Tom Shannon sculpture on top (Shannon also has a large work in the park). Pierre Yovanovitch chairs, a Jean Royère sofa, and chairs designed by McKillen are arranged around the room. Behind the check-in area is a series of Alberto Giacometti sketches that had been in a vault for 40 years, while opposite is a David Douglas Duncan photo of Picasso in an Indian headdress (McKillen owns a selection of the photographer’s archive).

Elsewhere in the hotel there are Leger tapestries that came from the Seagram Building and a stained glass window based on the first Henri Matisse drawing McKillen acquired. In every guest room there are further artworks on display (Hiroshi Sugimoto, more Bourgeois, Tracey Emin and Bernard Frize) as well as photographs of the artists and architects who have contributed to the estate, with pictures of them in situ while at work. The décor in the rooms is elegant and functional, with McKillen calling on Vietnamese design company District Eight (see W*205) to provide shelving, tables and chairs.

McKillen, who has interests in some of the best hotel properties in the world, especially in London – Claridge’s, The Connaught, The Berkeley – has project managed Villa La Coste himself. He is here every weekend overseeing all the elements, right down to the teapots you’ll pour from at breakfast and the books on the shelves in the rooms. His sister Mara, who has lived in Aix-en-Provence since 1990 and who discovered the historic estate for sale back in 2002, is heavily involved too. It is very much a family affair and McKillen has a long-serving and loyal team. His construction manager David Magill and surveyor Mark Allen have worked with him for years. ‘I like to keep the team small. I always say “don’t employ more than 11 because Jesus couldn’t handle 12”,’ he says, laughing.

McKillen is thoughtful and self-effacing; yet the passion and drive he dedicates to the ever-expanding project at Château La Coste is evident. While the hotel is receiving its finishing touches, his team is breaking ground on a number of new installations on the estate – one from Ai Weiwei, a collaboration between Tony Berlant and Frank Gehry, and three new museum buildings by Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Oscar Niemeyer. The Niemeyer design was signed off literally days before he died in 2012. 

Then there is the ‘mini Roden Crater that James Turrell has submitted,’ McKillen says nonchalantly. ‘Fabrication is all done – we just need to do the excavation work to install it. We should have it done by next spring. It makes sense to get that done while the big machinery is on site.’ Magill, sitting opposite McKillen, looks a little alarmed.

André Fu gives us a quick preview of the spa, which will be completed by the end of the year, and, as he walks us down a grand spiral staircase, he says, ‘it is a very personal working relationship with Paddy. I was sitting with him having coffee this morning and I came up with a sketch for a small meditation garden on a scrap of paper, which we decided there and then that we’d implement.’

Things do seem to simply evolve organically and most artists and architects come back to work on further projects. ‘I feel lonely when they do a project and then just disappear,’ says McKillen

Some installations change track because McKillen is keen to try not to touch a tree on the estate. ‘We protect them as though they were children,’ he says. But this deeply personal project also has to make commercial sense. McKillen will make certain it is a self-sufficient business, if only to protect his own children. ‘The worrying thing for nutcases like me is what happens if I get hit by a bus tomorrow,’ says McKillen. ‘I don’t want this to be a folly or burden for those left behind – Château La Coste has to sustain itself and feed the future. The winery and now the hotel has been set up to do exactly that.

As originally featured in the January 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*214)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Château la Coste website

Gaiole in Chianti is a village perched on top of a hill in the Tuscan wine region of Chianti. Dotted around the area are villas, small castles and vineyards, punctuated by olive trees and the rough vegetation typical of this part of the Italian countryside. It is a backdrop to Renaissance paintings and famous worldwide for its wines.

Gaiole in Chianti is home to the Castello di Ama winery, owned by husband and wife team Marco Pallanti and Lorenza Sebasti. Their winemaking adventure started in 1982, when Pallanti started working as an oenologist at the winery and met Sebasti, whose family owned part of the estate. The couple later took over the whole operation, completing a series of works to restore the vineyards, and buying up new land. Pallanti, who trained in Bordeaux, also regrafted over 50,000 vines, bringing in non-local varieties as well as introducing a new form of growing, called 'open lyre'. Thanks to these developments the Castello di Ama estate now produces 300,000 bottles a year.

Although Castello di Ama wine has a reputation as some of the best of the area, the winery is also a fully-fledged art destination. Initially working with Galleria Continua, an art gallery in nearby San Gimignano, the couple have opened the doors of their property to contemporary artists, and over the last 16 years built a serious collection of 13 site-specific art installations by the likes of Michelangelo Pistoletto, Daniel Buren, Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

The pair dubbed the project Castello di Ama per l’Arte Contemporanea, inviting artists to spend time at the winery, explore its history and enjoy its wine, before working on something to leave behind. 'The number one ingredient is always the artists’ generosity,' says Sebasti. 'Then comes time. And the third I’d say is our passion. We don’t use the art, for us it’s something visceral, it’s like looking at ourselves in the mirror.'

Visitors to Ama are greeted by a composition of bright rocks by Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou. Walking through the property they discover Carlos Garaicoa's Yo no quiero ver más a mis vecinos, a large-scale piece featuring reproductions of famous walls, from China’s Great Wall to the Berlin Wall. Daniel Buren has contributed a mirrored wall that frames the surrounding hills, creating an intimate but luminous room in one of the gardens. The two chapels on the property have been taken over by a light installation by Anish Kapoor and a sculptural installation by Hiroshi Sugimoto.

While all of the works are placed in conversation with the buildings and surrounding nature, some are fully integrated with the winery. Kendell Geers’ Revolution/Love neon installation and the late Chinese artist Chen Zhen’s La lumière intérieur du corps humain are placed in two cellars, amongst the wine barrels, in close conversation with the soul of the place.

Some of the art at Ama is tricky to get to. A statue by Louise Bourgeois, which the artist created for Ama in 2009, is located in an ancient water basin deep in the cellars. It is visible through a small hole in the floor and accessible only via a steep ladder.

The Bourgeois commission marked a pivotal moment for the couple. It introduced them to Philip Larratt-Smith, the Canadian art curator who was working with Bourgeois as literary archivist at the time. Larratt-Smith was later invited to write an essay on Ama’s art. The pair enlisted him as their curator at the end of 2015. Larratt-Smith now works closely with the couple to develop future art installations and introduce new artists to Ama.

'[Pallanti and Sebasti] see art in the way they see wine; something they are producing with a view to the long term, something that has to be handed down to the next generation,' says Larratt-Smith. 'There is a solidity and integrity to the process that to me has definitely informed the way they have approached and invited these artists to the project.'

'We are guardians, not owners,' says Sebasti. 'This is the way we approach things. This art is not personal or exclusive, it’s for the community, and for us it’s a great privilege, but we also feel the responsibility to share this privilege and transmit it so it can grow with time.'

Over the past few years, Pallanti and Sebasti have added other attractions, opening Il Ristoro di Ama, a 'winery with a kitchen' offering local wine paired with Tuscan dishes, and a series of suites in the Villa Ricucci, a 19th-century villa on the property. Furnishings by the Campana Brothers for Edra were introduced in the antique villa, part of an eclectic mix that reflects the spirit of the place.

Larratt-Smith suggests it’s important for visitors to experience the art at Ama at different times of the day; 'It’s quite changeable, it’s a living thing,' he says. It is crucial, he says, to look at art not in an institutional setting but in nature; 'where your brain is thinking in a different way and you look at art in a different way. I think that’s maybe rarer than it should be in contemporary life.'

Sebasti insists there is a definite logic to creating and keeping art in this environment. 'There is an analogy between this wine, as we intend it, and art as we intend it,' she says. 'Because, really, you can look for a masterpiece, but whether you achieve it or not, only time will tell.'

As originally featured in the July 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*208)

INFORMATION

For more information visit Castello D'Ama's website

Photography: Andrea Bosio

Louise Bourgois was 97 when she made the last of her Cell works in 2008, two years before she died.

In Cell (The Last Climb), an open door leads into a rusty wire cage. It’s not a prison but a gateway; inside, a spiral staircase leads up and out of the cage to the sky, and large blue glass balls are suspended like bubbles waiting to float free. At the centre of the cage is a brilliant blue rubber droplet like a giant tear – not falling but buoyed by this sense of floaty lightness – which Bourgeois described as a self-portrait.

For an artist who said she made art as a means of survival and a way of confronting fear, this work, a clear metaphor for death, is remarkably uplifting. It’s not fraught with anxiety, in the way that her works that typically explore unconscious emotions surrounding childhood memories, growing up, sex and motherhood are. Bourgeois worked tirelessly through her 70s, 80s and 90s with an urgent combative energy that one can only marvel at here. Perhaps by 2008 she was finally ready to let go. 

Bourgeois created 60 Cells. Of the 28 on display at the Guggenheim Bilbao, most were created in the last two decades of her life. Each Cell is a world; a stage set to either be contained in, journeyed through, peeked voyeuristically into, or be excluded from.

They are precise, contained, and complete spaces, featuring sculpture and objects that Bourgeois owned or gathered to tell autobiographical stories. Some are more literally based on memories than others. One draws on a memory of her parents' bedroom, another features a marble replica of her childhood home with a guillotine poised above it, anticipating a moment when it might all disappear.

Frank Gehry’s gallery interior, a seemingly endless maze of rooms and corridors that curve and twist, grow and shrink, is an invitation to get lost. That suits Bourgeois’ work down to the ground, because it’s never about what's outside, but always the warped, shape-shifting unpredictability of her interior world.

Like a spider’s web, this world is a place of seductive, horrible beauty. Inevitably you are drawn into it, and as you are you begin to see that the unconscious world she was exploring has its own own internal logic. Repeating symbols – mirrors (confrontation of the self), doors (secrets and safety), limbs (impotence), spiders (the mother) – become a language, which help you to interpret her reality. Eventually a bigger picture emerges. The show, like the body itself, is a place of trauma and escapism, fear and magic: both prison and refuge.

INFORMATION

'Structures of Existence: The Cells' is on view until 4 September. For more information, visit the Guggenheim Bilbao's website

ADDRESS

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Abandoibarra Etorb., 2
48009 Bilbao
Bizkaia, Spain

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'I started collecting about seven years ago, firstly with photography, and that's where my connection with Sotheby's began,’ says Erdem Moralioglu, just days after his celebrated A/W 2016 London Fashion Week show. He's surrounded by art works that will feature in the auction house’s first ‘Contemporary Curated’ London sale, guest edited by Moralioglu and taking place on 15 March.

Looking at a cluster of paintings that includes works by Georg Baselitz, Lucian Freud, Louise Bourgeois and Marlene Dumas, Moralioglu explains his selection criteria: ‘You can see the touch of the human hand across them all,’ he says, before acknowledging George Condo’s Untitled miniature, 2000, as his favourite lot.

‘It’s a fascinating process working with an auction house through all aspects of the sale, from cataloging to getting to grips with the body of work,’ Moralioglu continues, having also celebrated his brand’s 10th anniversary at the art specialist’s London S2 gallery last December. ‘It’s been an amazing learning curve, which I was really happy to be a part of.’

Renowned for his modern use of innovative textiles and original prints, the first work the Royal College of Art alumnus bought himself was a photograph by German Wolfgang Tillmans, and he has since moved onto illustration and painting for his personal collection. Opening his first retail space on London’s South Audley Street last year provided further impetus to invest. Moralioglu currently has a David Hockney photo collage and drawings by Andy Warhol and Jean Cocteau in store, while his latest purchases include works by Candida Höfer and Rineke Dijkstra.

But back to Sotheby's' lot: the expansive auction comprises 205 works with an average price point of £11,000, and spans American figurative painting, abstraction, sculpture and photography, with highlights including Josef Albers’ Study for Hommage to the Square: Framed Sky ‘C', 1970, and Yayoi Kusama’s Fear of Death, 2008.

‘The selection is an extraordinary mix,’ says Joanna Steingold, Sotheby's deputy director and head of 'Contemporary Curated'. ‘It’s not just works of £100,000 plus, it is starting from £500 through to a top lot by Antony Gormley at an estimated £200,000,' she explains. ‘We really want to invite the new curious collectors with this sale, and encourage people who might not have thought that they were able to buy from Sotheby’s before.’

The 'Contemporary Curated' series was first launched in the United States in 2013, and has since featured auctions guest curated by American author and avid collector James Frey, Tamara Mellon, Anna Sui and NFL player Keith Rivers. The next London satellite will take place in September this year.

’It’s a fascinating process working with an auction house through all aspects of the sale, from cataloging to getting to grips with the body of work,’ explains Moralioglu, pictured in his London store with some of his curated works. ‘It’s been an amazing learning curve, which I was really happy to be a part of’

INFORMATION                                                                                                                        

The 'Contemporary Curated' London auction takes place on 15 March at 10:30am. The pre-sale exhibition, also guest curated by Moralioglu, will be open to the public 12–14 March at Sotheby’s London. For more information, visit the Sotheby's website

ADDRESS

Sotheby’s
34–35 New Bond Street
London, W1A 2AA

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Hauser & Wirth’s outpost in Zurich has undergone a domestic reimagining, swapping its usual white cube format for a homely salon in which to explore artworks, books and prints during winter. Entitled ‘Salon d’Hiver’, the show draws inspiration from Hauser & Wirth’s publishing arm as well as its more recent initiative focusing on prints, editions and multiples.

Art objects and books by the likes of Dieter Roth, Louise Bourgeois, Martin Creed and Subodh Gupta are peppered throughout the gallery, nestled amongst furniture and other curios in an immersive environment conceived to feel like a home.

Wallpapers created by the gallery’s stable of artists serve as a brilliant backdrop to the exhibition – think Paul McCarthy’s butt plug-wielding, chocolate Santa Clauses; kaleidoscopic limbs by Pipilotti Rist; and a vibrant floral design by Caro Nieder. The gallery partnered with an antique furniture dealer to furnish the space, showcasing a Mies van der Rohe daybed amongst the art.

A comprehensive events programme is planned in tandem with ‘Salon d’Hiver’. The gallery has already hosted a children’s tea part as well as a duet of music evenings, with Martin Creed’s band and Allan Kaprow’s musical works taking the spotlight.

Visitors will be rewarded by repeat trips to the Swiss gallery, with new artworks set to regularly be installed throughout the duration of the exhibition. The current Christmas incarnation of the space will soon be rehung with a fresh selection of works, to creating an experience akin to a house being redecorated. We already feel at home.

INFORMATION

’Salon d’Hiver: Books - Prints - Multiples’ runs until 26 February. For more information visit the Hauser & Wirth website

ADDRESS

Limmatstrasse 270
8005 Zurich
Switzerland

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Louise Bourgeois' precariously balanced series of sculptures give the illusion of frailty, but on closer inspection a steel construction provides them with a hidden strength. Appearing like empty houses, the ‘Maisons Fragiles’ are a commentary on the solitude of domestic life, confronting the deeply repressed issues that conditioned her youth.

Now, the title of these poignant works has given birth to a new exhibition of the same name, currently on show at Hauser & Wirth London. Led by Bourgeois' steel houses, the exhibition encompasses the work of nine artists united by themes of fragility, vulnerability and protection.

Slightly bowed like glossy rose-tinted pools of liquid or blocks of ice, Roni Horn's translucent glass sculptures Two Pink Tons, 2008, sit in the centre of the smaller gallery space, appearing as if suspended in time and space. On the adjacent wall, Richard Serra's flat corten wall sculpture, Untitled, 1975, with its time-work patina, is a manifestation of the artist's interest in the collision of matter and space.

INFORMATION

’Maisons Fragiles’ is on view until 6 February. For more information visit Hauser & Wirth’s website

Photography courtesy the artists and Hauser & Wirth 

ADDRESS

Hauser & Wirth London
23 Savile Row
London, W1S 2ET

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Barcelona’s recently been casting an eye to its future. The overhaul of its legendary flea market, Els Encant Vells, was one such boost, and now it can add a brand new contemporary art gallery to its glossy résumé.

Launched last week, Fundació Gaspar is a private art initiative housed within Paula Cervelló, an early 15th century gothic palace. The inaugural exhibition – entitled ‘Art Strikes Back!’ – features a roster plucked from Hauser & Wirth’s stable, including Paul McCarthy, Louise Bourgeois, Subodh Gupta, amongst others.

At the foundation’s helm is Moishan Gaspar, the great-grandson of renowned gallerist Joan Gaspar I Xalabarder, whose gallery was an integral part of the city’s art scene for nearly a century. Bolstered by his pedigree and experience at several galleries prior, Gaspar is hoping to give international artists a platform in a city that has traditionally favoured classic art.

There’s an eclectic mix of artwork on show – Mark Wallinger’s mirrored Doctor Who homage dazzles in one room opposite a surreal McCarthy video work, while a soaring Martin Creed wall painting brings the gallery’s lofty ceilings to the fore. The potential of the renovated space is evident, although not fully explored in this greatest hits medley.

The foundation clocks in at 1,500 sq m, just under half of which will be dedicated to exhibitions. The remaining space is dedicated to a café in the courtyard, along with a well-stocked bookshop and film theatre specialising in art. And the gallery is expecting overspill from the neighbouring Picasso Museum.

‘Barcelona has been sleeping for the last 20 years when it comes to contemporary art,’ adds Gaspar. The new gallery could be the wake-up call the city needs.

INFORMATION

‘Art Strikes Back!’ runs until 28 March 2016. For more information, visit Fundació Gaspar’s website

ADDRESS

Fundació Gaspar
Palau Cervelló
Montcada 25
Barcelona

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'The subject of pain is the business I am in,' said Louise Bourgeois, the late French-American artist whose 70-year-career was driven primarily by profound anguish, anxiety, and fear. In her final decades, these feelings manifested themselves in the form of cells, sculptural compositions semi-enclosed by walls, which for her meant both a retreat from the outside world and the confines of her mental prison.

Dozens of these almost-architectural pieces are now on view now at Moscow Garage Museum of Contemporary Art’s 'Louise Bourgeois. Structures of Existence: The Cells,' alongside the early sculptures, paintings, and drawings that foreshadow this later body of work.

Additionally, the iconic and ominous nine-metre-tall bronze spider Maman greets visitors at the square in front of the museum, and the never-before-presented monumental mirror Has the day invaded the night or has the night invaded the day? will confront them as they enter the atrium.

The cells, comprising found and sculpted objects – meat grinders, mesh cages, glass orbs and stairs to nowhere – revisit recurring themes: the mirror as a symbol of both deflection and self-awareness, for example, or the spiral, which for Bourgeois represented control. Throughout, her pain is palpable: a headless wooden mannequin arches its back in agony. Elsewhere, the blade of a paper cutter is poised to fall on a small sculpture of a person.

In laying these raw emotions bare, however, the artist found comfort. 'Bourgeois always said that she made work for herself,' says Garage chief curator Kate Fowle, emphasising the freedom and autonomy inherent in creating these miniature worlds. Bourgeois expressed her need to create art explicitly in Cell I, in which she stitched a message onto the bedsheets: 'Art is the Guarantee of Sanity.'

INFORMATION

'Louise Bourgeois. Structures of Existence: The Cells' is on view until 7 February

Photography: Egor Slizyak. Courtesy Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

ADDRESS

Moscow Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
9/32 Krimsky Val st
119049, Moscow

Louise Bourgeois might be best known for her otherworldly spider sculptures, but a new showcase of all-hanging works at Cheim & Read in New York traces the artist's fascination with suspended art, which she has continually experimented with throughout her career. Aptly titled 'Suspension', the exhibition is the first survey of Bourgeois' hanging sculptures, featuring examples from her recurring themes - like the 1968 'Janus' series and her 1990s cloth figures.

Spanning more than 45 years of Bourgeois' career, the 25-piece show is a tribute to the artist's dynamic way of working. 'Louise liked doing forms with different materials. She had no allegiance to any material,' says her longtime chief assistant Jerry Gorovoy, who led a private tour during the opening of the show. 'Sometimes the same piece would be done in different materials and they would all have a very different feel.'

From fabric-covered torsos hung tenderly upside down to the bronze-painted 'Lair' (1962), one of the earliest pieces in the show, the sculptures share physical characteristics despite their formal differences. Even the more abstract pieces - such as 'The Quartered One' (1964-5) and 'Fée Couturière' (1963) - have anthropomorphic qualities, linking back to recurring themes in Bourgeois' work, whether they be feelings toward her father or her ideas about gender and sexuality.

By abandoning conventional plinths and allowing each work to move freely from its perch, the past Wallpaper* guest editor (W*115) bestows her sculptures with an instability that counters their density and weight. The hanging of works is also an expression of her state of mind. The artist once traced her fascination with suspension back to her childhood, when her father would hang his collection of wooden chairs off wood beams in the attic. 'It was very pure,' she once said. 'You would look up and see these armchairs hanging in very good order. The floor was bare - this is the origin of a lot of hanging pieces.

'Suspension' unveils several works for the first time: the eye-catching and macabre 'Legs' (2001); the knitted, double-headed 'Arch of Hysteria' (2004); and the spiraling 'The Couple' (2007-9), a seven-metre version of which will be installed in Vienna's Wien Mitte station in the near future. Bourgeois may no longer be with us, but her spirit, as this exhibition proves, is still very much alive.

ADDRESS

Cheim & Read
547 West 25th Street
New York

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The sleeping security guard is already the star of this year's edition of Frieze. He sits, we assume he sits there still, head propped against a wall of the Hauser & Wirth stand, snoozing oblivious, tweeted and Instagrammed, gone social, possibly even viral. It doesn't look like a happy sleep, or a tormented sleep or an active sleep, just a standard preparation for death sleep. Frieze can get you that way.

Visitors look at the tagged-up security guide and smile or think about a prod. Is he art or just a lazy sentinel? He is art of course - phew, no unpleasantness required then - actually Sleeping Guard by Christoph Büchel. And he is part of what is easily the most interesting and successfully conceived stand at the fair.

Curated by Mark Wallinger, a new signing for Hauser & Wirth, the stand is cluttered and domestic. Titled 'A Study in Red and Green', it is a take on Sigmund Freud's study in Hampstead and greater than the sum of its Louise Bourgeois, Martin Creed, Paul McCarthy, Roni Horn, Subodh Gupta (amongst others) parts. It feels nocturnal, like the seemingly random-but-not-stops of a restless unconscious. Perhaps these are the security guard's dreams. Who knows what he has seen. There are other interesting things to look at, disorientating and random in their own way, but nothing as arresting.

Carsten Höller has created a kindergarten at the Gagosian stand. Which is nice. Cory Arcangel's carpet on the Lisson Gallery stand is a success. The gallery goes big on Arcangel's video pieces and Ryan Gander's concrete sculptures and to good effect. Thomas Dane's stand is well composed and I liked the paintings by Ella Kruglyanskaya, a New York-based Latvian, at the Gavin Brown stand which looked French and flighty and funny though no one else seemed much taken.

There is a strong showing from Brazilian galleries this year, including Galeria Luisa Strina from Sao Paulo and the excellent A Gentil Carioca from Rio. They are a welcome addition to the mix, even if most of the action is around the cluster of blue chips during the press and VIP opening (how 'V' is always hard to know. The Frieze caste system remains impenetrable.)

The experience (more of an 'assault' in the past) is also generally more civilised this year. BarberOsgerby's Universal Design Studio has designed the tent and the aisles are wide and there is more air in the air but still too few places to sit down and get your bearings. The VIPs - men in art scarves and art spectacles, tottering ladies in leopard print skirts with taut, tortured looking faces - are as worth watching as ever. And listening too.

The more abundant air is kissed, dinner arrangements made (and probably forgotten) before they wobble or glide back to their idling luxury sedans which will spend much of the rest of the day snarled and stuttering amongst other luxury sedans. While our security guard, happily or unhappily, remains oblivious.

ADDRESS

Frieze London
Regent’s Park
London NW1 4PJ

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Standing on the shores of the strait that separates Vardoya Island from Norway, the Steilneset is a brooding, complex structure. A regimented forest of wooden supports, it stalks across the rough rocky ground on the edge of the small town of Vardø. Designed by architect Peter Zumthor and artist and past Wallpaper* guest editor (W*115) Louise Bourgeois, the Steilneset is a memorial, a physical structure for the remembrance of the sins of an earlier, unforgiving and rather more brutal era.

In the dark days of the early 17th century, the witch mania that infected almost all of Europe reached this small fishing community and tore it apart. Armed with accusations and confessions - the texts of which have survived the centuries intact - the accidents, illnesses, errors and complexities of a harsh rural existence were instead attributed to 91 unfortunates, all of whom were believed to have made a personal pact with the devil. Over the course of roughly 100 years, those accused of such witchcraft were either burnt at the stake or tortured to death.

To memorialise such a distant and culturally complex event is a tall order; even more so when the finished memorial needs to be a tourist attraction in its own right. Bourgeois and Zumthor were appointed as part of Norway's ongoing National Tourist Routes programme, an expansive and hugely ambitious scheme to criss-cross this vast nation with man-made viewpoints and destinations that enhance the already spectacular natural landscapes. There are 18 routes in all, the majority clustered around the steep valleys and Fjords to the south-west.

Svein Ronning, the art curator for the NTR project, invited Bourgeois to design the memorial, with Zumthor as her collaborator. The slow back and forth between the pair, living and working on different continents, eventually led to Zumthor kick-starting the design and creating two structures, one enclosure for the artwork itself and a long, abstract pavilion containing information about the dark events of the past.

When Wallpaper* was last up in these chilly latitudes, back in late 2008, the seaweed-encrusted shores of the northerly were yet to be sullied by bulldozers and workboots (see W*115). Our correspondent walked the icy site with Zumthor and everyone tried to imagine exactly how it would be once the Swiss architect's collaboration with the New York based artist was complete. The following 18 months saw budget increases, design complications and, sadly, the death of Bourgeois at the age of 98.

But now the memorial is finished, opened by Queen Sonja and firmly putting Vardø on the map. We recently made a return trip to the town, making sure to pack our most efficient base layer for the three flight journey to this easterly tip of Europe. Here, on the edge of the freezing expanses of the Barents Sea, the final few wires were being wound into place and the churned up ground beneath the buildings was being shovelled back into an approximation of untouched landscape.

Vardø is very self-contained. The town's fish processing industry is long gone, appropriated by Chinese suppliers and off-shore factory ships. The town sucks in plenty of government subsidy and the emphasis is on bringing in tourists - mostly birdwatchers - and stopping the residential exodus by betting big on a new gas field supply depot, the Vardø Barents Base, just along the coast to boost local employment.

The townscape is littered with abandoned houses, their primary coloured weatherboarding and thick net curtains concealing their lack of inhabitants. A local museum plays up the longstanding cultural and economic connection to Russia - the border post is just a few miles along the coast - neglecting to mention the former Soviet Union's proximity initiated another key spoke in the economy - the silvery blue dome of a US military radar installation - operated by the Norwegian military - still dominates the town.

From the distant hump of Domen Mountain, the ridge that overlooks the town (once believed to be a meeting place for the witches' Sabbath), Vardø reads as a series of abstract forms; the colourful scatter of its houses, the white spike of Vardø church, the Globus II radar, and the star-shaped fortifications of the Vardøhus, home to a modest museum as well as the island's only two trees and commanding officer Major Tor Arild Melby (who serves a mean smoked whalemeat canapé). The Steilneset joins this group, another object in a grand still life (an approach crystallised in Zumthor's elegant working models).

Zumthor's pavilion dominates the site, located just a few minutes walk from the town centre. Taking inspiration from the vast wooden racks once used to dry the daily catch, the structure strides for 125 metres along the rocky beach. The tall wooden frame contains a stretched, taut canvas object, light coloured on the outside but dark and murky within. This long corridor is accessed via a ramp, taking visitors up into the heart of the pavilion, their views and sense of the surroundings strictly mediated. The chief sources of light are 91 windows, one for each victim, each accompanied by a solitary bulb and a printed piece of silk that sets out the accusation, confession and fate of those brought before the court. It's a sombre space, kept barely above the brisk temperature on the shore outside, and smelling strongly of wood and wood treatment. Zumthor apparently chose the location of each window by throwing a dice, a method as arbitrary and cold as the 'trial by water' that sealed so many fates.

Alongside the information centre is a black glass cube housing Bourgeois's artwork, The Damned, The Possessed and The Beloved. Again, the structure is open to the elements, and the smoked glass plays with this northerly location's relentless summer daytime (and corresponding winter darkness). The five jets of fire in the flaming chair dance grotesquely in the seven mirrors above it, evoking the families that were literally torn apart by fire. Any misgivings one might have about the apparent simplicity of the statement are dismissed by the atmospheric qualities of the site.

The Varanger stretch of the National Tourist Routes might not have the visual drama of sheer-sided fjords; it's a more contemplative, rugged and lonely landscape. The 154km route through Finnmark from Gornitak to Hamningberg is sparsely populated but magically lit, a rare place where the inherent strangeness of architectural interventions is enhanced to the point of being an almost spiritual experience. The sins of the past are presented baldly, their emotional impact still as strong now as it must have been over 300 years ago. Like so many of Zumthor's other works, we suspect the Steilneset will become a place of pilgrimage. The visitors might have architectural motivations at first, but their journey can't fail to be touched by the geography and history of this magnificent landscape.