THE RECESS 006
including: Venice Biennale / Andy Goldsworthy at MONA / Helsinki museum competition / Peppi Bottrop X the Bechers / George Wylie museum / Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery / Venice is falling / Eurovision
28 April 2024
As previewed in The Recess 005, and as you will have seen all over social media and the arts news unless you’re under a rock, last week was the opening of Venice Biennale of Art. It was huge. recessed.space had two writers and a photographer on the islands to pick up the best of the architecture/art crossover, and we will be reporting back over the coming weeks - including an interview with the artist, architect, and curator of Australia’s beautiful Golden Lion winning pavilion. We also spoke to the architects behind Lithuania’s sinister and enormous installation, which will be on recessed.space over the coming weeks.
VPPR (the team behind GB’s 2021 Architecture Biennale project, see 00029) were the architects for John Akomfrah’s British Pavilion, which allowed for new routes in and out of the pavilion as well as using the basement in a subtle and colourful design to support the journey through the artist’s video works.
But we just won’t be able to fit everything into articles, so here is a quick roundup of the rest of Biennale:
Architecture in the main exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere
Adriano Pedrosa, the São Paulo-based curator of this edition has divided opinion with his main show, spread across the main exhibition halls of the Giardini and Arsenale. With more dead than living artists, and a deep focus on filling the - geographic, racial, gender, and sexuality - gaps of the previous 59 Biennales, it was less a focus on the future of art and design, and more a repair of the past.
For the architectural-eyed visitor, there were moments though. Nil Yalter, born in Cairo in 1938, received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and was front and centre in the main exhibition with Topak Ev (1973), a tent made by the Bektik nomadic community of Central Anatolia, set against wall-work Exile is a Hard Job (1977/2024), a video and poster political work which when set against the tent set an agenda for the exhibition to follow.
A second Lifetime Achievement award went to Anna Maria Maiolino who over 60 years has worked across countless media. At the deepest part of the Arsenale site, her Ao finiti [To infinity] (1994/2024) squeezed, layered, and folded 10 tons of unfired clay into a room-sized work. By November, when Biennale ends, this work may look quite different, sunken, melted, and softened into the architecture holding it.
In a room of colourful, graphic abstract works, Saloua Raouda Choucair’s (1916-2017) Rhythmical Composition with White Sphinx (1951) shouted mid-century modernism. Born in Beirut, the painting was made after a visit to Paris where she experienced post-war artists such as Fernand Léger, but in adopting an aesthetic then twisted it into an Islamic-influenced motif that suggests architectural forms overlapping.
Architecture across the collateral shows
Outside of the main exhibition architecture recurred as both setting and theme. Fourteen large canvases by Eduard Angeli, an Austrian artist who has lived in Venice for many years, depict uncanny, silent scenes of the city. Summoning references to Giorgio di Chirico or Edward Hopper, the oil and charcoal works offer a vantage of Venice that are not trapped in cliché or trope (details HERE).
Works by James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee play with the beautiful interiors of the Instituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in a show organised by Michael Werner Gallery (HERE). Both artists’ work is connected to Dada and Surrealism, and there’s a real sense of play and subversion, as well as moments of joyful beauty.
Victoria Miro’s Venice gallery was turned into a paint-splashed New York studio with the work of Sarah Sze, with a hang that saw paint covering walls and floors as well as canvas, the terrazzo floor layered with patterns of paint. Is this exhibition? Is it studio? Or a conflation of the two? (HERE).
Māori architect Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta was invited to create a ritual and conversation space by Artes Mundi winner Taloi Havini who is curating an exhibition in the cavernous Ocean Space, a 9th century church that is home to TBA-21. A simple space formed of skew-laid bricks, a low boundary, and slung fabric cover, it will host conversations around deep sea mining, lagoon health, and community activism over the summer months. (HERE).
American artist Rick Lowe channels the sublime architecture of Palazzo Grimani in his Gagosian exhibition, The Arch within the Arc (HERE). His vortex-fuelled abstracts references the arches, vaults and ornamentation of the palazzo as well as the labyrinthine movement of navigating Venice.
Nebula, a group exhibition organised by Fondazione Between Art Film returned to Complesso dell’Ospedaletto with a sequential journey around the grand and intimate spaces of the building playing host to a range of moving image works from the likes of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Saodat Ismailova, and Diego Marcon (below). With lighting, curtains, and installation radically transforming the historic setting, the overarching curation speaks to attempts and methods to respond to societal fragmentation (HERE).
A clash of solid & ephemeral colour: David Batchelor at Cecilia Brunson Projects
For over three decades, David Batchelor has been exploring how colours interact with one another, place & material. With a show at Cecilia Brunson Projects the artist continues this exploration across paper, concrete, beads & light.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
Neural networks & the architectural imagination
In this comment piece, Matthew Lloyd Roberts considers the increasing use of AI images within architectural production, drawing connections from the digital hallucinations to the crisis in architectural labour.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
Venice 2024: Anna Jermolaewa’s refugee stories in the Austrian Pavilion
In the first of our reports from the 2024 Venice Biennale of Art we take a look at the Austrian entry, a minimalist but deep study of an immigrant’s experience of space & place by Anna Jermolaewa. In a carefully composed set piece of five installations, the artist explores memories & hopes of being a refugee through objects, performance & urban furniture.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
The art of being alone: watching porn with Dean Sameshima
Taking his camera to the darkness of Berlin’s pornographic cinemas, artist Dean Sameshima considers the presence of customers who sit in both privacy & public. Looking past the silhouette of the lone figures watching the films, Will Jennings focuses on the tiny details around the room.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
Venice is falling
While Venice is in the news for Biennale, The Art Newspaper reports that urgent action is needed to protect the city from rising water levels. Maria Piana, the architect who oversees St Mark’s, has spent four decades working on the city’s architecture and says that iron tie-rods stabilising floors to walls throughout the city are beginning to rust.
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
New Andy Goldsworthy installation in Oz
MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Australia, has installed a new Andy Goldsworthy work Stone Sea Passage (2024). Goldsworthy’s gallery, Galerie Lelong & Co., announced the permanent installation on Instagram, with photos showing a long, sharply cut channel within local sandstone blocks that gradually descend into the River Derwent.
🔷 SEE HERE 🔷
Architectural competition for new Helsinki architecture & design museum
Having dismissed the advances of Guggenheim to build a museum overlooking Helsinki’s harbour, the city have now opened an two-stage architectural competition to design a new museum of architecture and design. Looking for a “globally unique” building it’s sure to attract not only the obvious starchitect names, but many from the younger generation from across the world who might adopt new methods, materials and ideas as cultural architecture moves into the anthropocene age.
🔷 DETAILS HERE 🔷
Peppi Bottrop riffs off the Bechers at Pilar Corrias
Abstraction meets Bernd and Hilla Becher at Pilar Corrias gallery in London. The first artist to be given two exhibitions across the existing and new gallery at each end of Savile Row, Peppi Bottrop is showing large, physically energetic abstract works. In the basement of Pilar Corrias’ newest gallery, designed by Cowie Montgomery Architects, Bottrop draws inspiration from and shows alongside nine of the Bechers’ Blast Furnace photographs (1970-94).
🔷 READ HERE 🔷
New Lévy Gorvy Dayan opens in a grand London ballroom
Just a short walk from Pilar Corrias in central London is Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery’s new London space at 35 Dover Street, which opened last week with a solo exhibition from New York-based artist N. Dash. With a strong architectural component in the works - not only in geometry and form but also in the direct use of the materials such as insulation and hardware within the compositions - the space is a grand setting. Once the home home to the Empress Club, one of the first women-only members’ clubs in the city and opened by Queen Victoria in 1897, the main exhibition space is the former grand ballroom.
🔷 DETAILS HERE 🔷
The Wyllieum opens in Greenock
Scotland’s newest museum has opened in Greenock at the mouth of the River Clyde, dedicated to the life and work of George Wyllie. One of the country’s most loved and recognisable artists, Wylie (who died in 2012, aged 90) spent his life making socially engaged artwork and theatre rooted in social equity, rights and socialist principles.
🔷 MORE HERE 🔷
Over its first two years, recessed.space has published 188 articles from across the world on the best of thinking from where art & architecture overlap. If you enjoy recessed.space, please consider donating to support new writing.
The design of Eurovision
From arguably the most important event in the art calendar, Biennale, to perhaps the second most important … Eurovision. With the week-long event kicks off in a weeks time in Malmö, Sweden - from 7 May and with the grand final on Saturday 11 May - the stage has quite literally been set.
Designed by Green Wall Designs - who also created the ABBA Voyage (as written about in recessed.space 000074 - with production designer Florian Weider, the design will be seen by over 160m people.
You don’t have long to wait until you can see the cross-shaped 360 degree stage on your TV, but why not use the time between now and then to revisit our interview last May with the designer of 2023’s Eurovision, Julio Himede of Yellow Studio to understand about the processes that lead to one of the most exuberant pop presentations in the world!