Zoe Zenghelis: Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was?

The Architectural Association will host the first retrospective exhibition of the works of Zoe Zenghelis. As a two-part exhibition, held in collaboration with Betts Project, the two venues jointly present and review a broad range of Zenghelis’ paintings, from the 1960s through to 2020, alongside a unique collection of her work as a member of Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Accompanied by a selection of studies, sketches and archival documents, it reviews the working process behind Zenghelis’ OMA paintings and explores her teaching methods at the AA. Alongside the exhibition, a comprehensive monograph of her works will be published by AA Publications, which will be launched over the course of the show.

Zoe Zenghelis is an Athenian artist who has been living and working in London since her student years. After studying painting in Athens she continued her study in stage design and painting at the Regent Street Polytechnic under Frank Auerbach, Lawrence Gowing, and Leon Kossoff. She started her painting career as a founding member of OMA, where her collaboration with other OMA members widened their horizons and opened up new opportunities for them in painting and architecture. She has created a large body of work expressing a playful yet iconoclastic combination of visual and mental ecstasy that evokes a very particular urban form; one that is perhaps a surreal mix of the Aegean landscape of her youth and the metropolitan tectonic of cities such as Paris, Berlin, New York or London, where she has lived and worked since 1955.

In 1982, Alvin Boyarsky invited Zoe and Madelon Vriesendorp to run Colour Workshop at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, a career that continued until 1993. Their legacy effected a seminal change in the way that architectural representation was thought of at the AA, and also reintroduced painting as a mode of thinking about space, light, colour and proportion: a fundamental shift in the architectural pedagogy.

Zenghelis’ paintings are inspired by metropolitan structure, landform, and abstract tectonics. Yet the imagery is quintessentially modern and modernist: it is an imagery of the fragment, the collage, the assemblage, the parts standing for the whole, and often greater than the whole. Her particular colour palettes, abstract planes, and jagged forms locate her quite comfortably within the lineage of modernist painters, who challenge the conventional aesthetic rules and incite a search for a paranoid-critical rationality. At the same time, Zenghelis’ works have been influenced and developed within the context of the mid-20th century contemporary art in London, when, beyond the aesthetics of common sense, the post-war British modernist painters abandoned any grand narratives and refused to serve institutional social or political projects; they chose to be “sole coherent units” as Frank Auerbach once claimed.

Curator: Hamed Khosravi

In collaboration with: Platon Issaias
Design and Production Assistant: Daryan Knoblauch

AA Public Programme: Manijeh Verghese, Liam Green
AA Print Studio: Oliver Long, Anna Lisa Reynolds
AA Publications: Maria Shéhérazade Giudici
AA Archives: Edward Bottoms
AA Audio-Visual: Joel Newman, Thomas Parkes
AA Facilities: Nicholas Day, Grzegorz Jan Korcel, Anita Pfauntsch, Colin Prendergast, Leslaw Skrzypiec, Mariusz Stawiarski, Martynas Vinksna
Invigilation: Yes People

Animation: © Daryan Knoblauch, 2021

Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was? is on view at the AA Gallery from Friday, May 21 – Wednesday, June 30, 2021. The exhibition is open between 10am–6pm BST from Monday to Saturday, and is closed on Sundays.

Visitors will need to book a timed ticket to access the exhibition. We will be welcoming a maximum of ten visitors per hour, to ensure that physical distancing can be upheld throughout the exhibition. Book your ticket here.