Veronika Kellndorfer: Dialogue with Silver Lake, Metabolism of Architecture

Veronika Kellndorfer’s exhibition explores the idea that architecture serves as a preservation of history. She investigates how the past manifests itself in buildings and how these traces can be transformed into images of architectural spaces. Her work raises essential questions concerning representation and the capacity of art to create accurate and evocative images of architecture. After immersing herself in the Neutra VDL House’s history and design during an intensive research period in March 2022, Kellndorfer has produced a collection of new works that respond to the site’s context, history, and design.

Richard Neutra is considered one of the most significant architects of the mid-century modernist movement and pioneered the creation of an integrated relationship between built structures and the natural environment. He sought to blur the boundaries between interior and exterior, using the landscape as a foundation for his designs. At the Neutra VDL House, he integrated water elements into the building’s design, creating a dialogue between the structure and its surroundings. Kellndorfer’s artistic intervention manifests as free standing glass sculptures that reflect the building’s mirrors and watery surfaces. The engraved silkscreened images capture the interplay of light and shadow on the building’s surfaces, engendering a dynamic connection between the architecture and its environment.

Kellndorfer fragments elements of architectural and vegetal structures, placing them into new constellations reversing the hierarchical relationship between architectural modernity and nature in favor of an interplay between geometric and organic forms. Her understanding of art as a fragile, ever-changing matter coincides with her concept of making work that functions at the intersection of art and architecture. Far from being a mere two-dimensional representation of architecture, it manages to work in a kind of “reverse engineering” process.

Kellndorfer’s work also acknowledges the VDL Neutra House’s history, which succumbed to a destructive fire in March 1963. A poignant tribute to the lost structure, Kellndorfer employs a drone to hover over Silver Lake, carrying a burning model of the original VDL House. The work adds another layer of meaning to the private space(s)of the architect, and questions the connection between “image” and “real space” in the “now-time”.

Veronika Kellndorfer (Berlin) is a visual artist. She transfers her photographs of architecture and plants as silkscreen prints fired into glass. Transparency, reflection and opacity, she uses the materiality of glass and textile to make visible the disturbing potentials and aesthetic appearance of architectural icons. She has most recently been represented at Neue Nationalgalerie, 2023 Mies Van der Rohe Haus, 2020 and original Bauhaus exhibition, 2019 in Berlin. On Lina Bo Bardi, she showed works at the Curitiba Biennial at Museu Oscar Niemeyer, 2019, the National Museum Oslo, 2017, Christopher Grimes Gallery, 2016, Casa de Vidro, São Paulo, 2015 and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, 2014. In Los Angeles she held exhibitions at the USC Verle Annis Gallery, 2003, at the Hammer Museum 2008 and 2006–18 at the Christopher Grimes Gallery and the Getty Center, 2019.

Dialogue with Silver Lake, Metabolism of Architecture is organized by the Neutra VDL House director Noam Saragosti, Christopher Grimes Projects and the artist. Exhibition supported by the Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House. In collaboration with the architect Axel Ludolf.