FOLLY: Art after Architecture
21 November 2013–23 March 2014
Lewis Glucksman Gallery
University College Cork
Cork, Ireland
Artists: Jeff Carter, Blaise Drummond, Laura Gannon, Pierre Huyghe, Chris Mottalini, Eamon O’Kane, and Hiroshi Sugimoto
Curated by Gary Boyd and Fiona Kearney
FOLLY: Art after Architecture brings together Irish and international contemporary artists whose work has been inspired by iconic buildings of architectural modernism. Many of the artists are concerned with ideas of representation and interpretation, as well as the history and space of the specific modernist structures they explore. From Eileen Gray’s seminal E1027 to Mies Van der Rohe’s restored Farnsworth House, Paul Rudolph’s demolished residences to Walter Gropius’s imagined Chicago Tribune Tower, the buildings referenced in FOLLY have had a mixed collection of fates.
Their presence in this exhibition affords them another afterlife. The qualities that make the architecture significant are played with, exposed, re-canonised, made ambiguous, and eulogised. By creating fictional moments, questioning conventional documentation or excavating troubled histories of production, each artist invites you to think about how we experience and understand architecture today.
FOLLY includes Hiroshi Sugimoto’s celebrated photographic studies that deliberately blur distinctive landmarks of 20th-century architecture, and Pierre Huyghe’s film This is Not a Time for Dreaming, which explores Le Corbusier’s one and only building in North America, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard. Laura Gannon considers the controversial history of Eileen Gray’s E1027 house in Cap-Martin, while Eamon O’Kane reflects on the experience of architecture in his colourful paintings of works by Alvar Aalto, Philip Johnson and Lina Bo Bardi, his use of vivid pigments contrasting with the stark monochromatic tones usually associated with modernist architecture. Chris Mottalini documents the now derelict homes of Paul Rudolph in a poignant series after you left, they took it apart, while Jeff Carter modifies IKEA products to create a playful homage to Walter Gropius’s plans for the Chicago Tribune Tower. Blaise Drummond’s work focuses on the Farnsworth House, using the recognisable form of Mies van der Rohe’s masterpiece to generate new pictorial compositions where the often isolated constructions of modernism are depicted in a colourful exchange with advertising images and the natural world.
Whether creating fictional moments, questioning the visual archives of modernism or excavating troubled histories of production, the artists in FOLLY invite us to encounter architecture in new and exciting ways.
An illustrated catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition. For further details and advance ordering, please contact exhibitions [at] glucksman.org.
FOLLY is accompanied by an extensive programme of curated events, talks, art courses and workshops. Please consult our seasonal brochure at glucksman.org for further information on these activities. Forthcoming artist talks and academic lectures include:
Dr. Paul Hegarty, French Department, University College Cork, 14 February, 1pm
Helen Carey, Director, Limerick City Gallery of Art, 13 February, 1pm
John Gerrard, artist, 20 February, 1pm
Dr. Damian Bracken, School of History, University College Cork, 6 March, 1pm
Nathalie Weadwick, Director, Irish Architecture Foundation, 20 March, 1pm
FOLLY: Art after Architecture is supported by The Arts Council of Ireland, the Cork Centre for Architectural Education, UCC/CIT, the British Council and private philanthropy through Cork University Foundation.
