KING SIZE, 2023

High-definition video, loop. Color, sound.

Marco Brambilla's latest creation, KING SIZE, is a monumental video collage set to debut at the MSG Sphere's grand opening on September 29, 2023, coinciding with U2's inaugural residency. This four-minute work pays homage to both the iconic Elvis Presley and the evolution of Las Vegas.

Elvis Presley, known as the King of Rock and Roll, was more than just a musical legend. He transcended into the realm of cinema, starring in an astonishing 33 films, earning a place as one of the most adored American film icons in history. Yet, behind the glitz and glamour, Elvis carried the shadow of human frailty. He embodied the American Dream, yet also became its ultimate victim.

KING SIZE is not merely an exploration of Elvis's multifaceted life, it's a journey through the transformation of Las Vegas itself. Just as Elvis evolved from a charismatic army officer to a swaggering movie star and later a bloated icon, Las Vegas has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis. From a modest desert oasis, it morphed into the neon-lit epicenter of spectacle and decadence. This intricate interplay between Elvis and Las Vegas narratives forms the core of Brambilla's creation.

The passing of Elvis Presley marked the end of an era in American culture, leaving behind an enduring legacy. Brambilla's KING SIZE is a grand homage, blurring the boundaries between persona and image, and challenging the line between reality and fantasy. Through an upward-scrolling video montage, viewers are propelled through the phases of Elvis's life, each illuminated by clips from his films and electrifying performances. Simultaneously, it traces the evolution of Las Vegas into the epicenter of the American entertainment complex. At the pinnacle of this scrolling spectacle, Elvis transcends mortality, standing as a colossal monument akin to the Statue of Liberty. His dreams, myriad incarnations, both on and offstage, converge in concentric rings, swirling within the subconscious—a testament to his enduring legacy.

To bring this ambitious vision to life, Brambilla employed artificial intelligence (AI), infusing life into Elvis and the surreal Vegas settings. The AI-generated imagery adds a mesmerizing layer to the spectacle, with Elvis appearing to rise from stacks of golden coins, his very form transformed into gold.

The debut of KING SIZE at the MSG Sphere marks a historic moment in the world of art and entertainment. Brambilla's creation takes audiences on a unique journey. As viewers step inside the Sphere, there is no sense of traditional architecture; instead, they find themselves enveloped by an immersive experience, where the screen, comprising thousands of LEDs, feels more like a living membrane than a static wall.

Dialogue with Silver Lake
Metabolism of Architecture

Neutra VDL House, Silverlake, 2023

Site-specific works (in chronological order)

1: In Dialogue with Silverlake, 2023
3 glass panels each 160 x 70 cm, 63 x 27 1/2 inches, installation view, Edition 1 of 3

2: Night Shot / Day Shot,
Silverlake Boulevard, 2023
two curved glass panels, 40 x 60 cm and 40 x 98 cm, 16 inches x 23 2/3 inches and 15 3/4 inches x 38 1/2 inches, installation view, Edition 1 of 5

3: The Burnt House, part 1, 2023
hand blown glass flame mobile, dimensions variable, installation view

4: Lina Bo Bardi, triangulo, 2015
30 x 30 x 30 cm, 11 2/3 x 11 2/3 x 11 2/3 inches 2 dichroic glass panels and 1 silk screen glass, Edition 5 of 5

5: Richard Neutra, A-shaped, 2023
30 x 30 x 30 cm, 11 2/3 x 11 2/3 x 11 2/3 inches 2 diochric glass panels and 1 silk screened glass

Veronika Kellndorfer's exhibition at the VDL House in Silverlake draws inspiration from her residency at the VDL Research House. Through her exploration, she investigates how architecture encapsulates historical narratives and translates remnants of the past into captivating images of architectural spaces. Within her work, she challenges the concept of representation and explores the transformative potential of art in capturing the essence of architecture. This series of new works is a direct response to the context, history, and design of the Neutra VDL House, following Kellndorfer's in-depth research in March 2022.

The Neutra VDL House, designed by the influential Richard Neutra, stands as an embodiment of the mid-century modernist movement. Neutra revolutionized the integration of built structures with the natural environment, erasing the boundaries between interior and exterior spaces. Water elements were seamlessly incorporated into the building's design, fostering an engaging dialogue between the structure and its surrounding landscape. Kellndorfer's artistic intervention takes the form of freestanding glass sculptures that mirror and reflect the watery surfaces of the Neutra VDL House. Through imprinted silkscreened images, she skillfully captures the interplay of light and shadow, forging a dynamic connection between the architectural elements and the environment.

In her artistic process, Kellndorfer deconstructs elements of both architectural and botanical structures, rearranging them in novel constellations that challenge the traditional hierarchy between architectural modernity and nature. Her work evokes a dialogue between geometric and organic forms. Embracing the ephemeral and ever-changing nature of art, she creates pieces that exist at the intersection of art and architecture. Far beyond being a simple representation of architecture, her work engages in a captivating process of "reverse engineering."

Additionally, Kellndorfer pays homage to the historical significance of the VDL Neutra House, which tragically succumbed to a devastating fire in March 1963. In a poignant tribute to the lost structure, she employed a drone that carried a burning model of the original VDL House, hovering over Silver Lake. This artwork adds profound meaning to the architect's private spaces and prompts contemplation on the intricate relationship between "image" and "real space" in the present moment.

Veronika Kellndorfer participated in an artist talk at the VDL House, joined by architect and educator Mark Lee of Johnston Marklee. They discussed how Kellndorfer's residency at the VDL House influenced the creation of her site-specific artworks, exploring the significance of the house and its historical context. The conversation provided valuable insights into the interplay between art and architecture, enhancing the viewers' understanding of Kellndorfer's exhibition and its connection to the Neutra VDL House.

Wave Pillar, 2022

hammered stainless steel
800 x 140 cm x 87 cm
Helsingborg, Sweden

Rising 8 meters above Kajpromenaden in central Helsingborg, the free-standing steel sculpture Wave Pillar engages in visual discourse with its environment, mirroring its surroundings like a calm water surface, yet its rippled facade charts the dynamic spectrum of wave movements from 2-10 m/s, embodying the transition from gentle breezes to robust winds.

Historically, maritime art captured the tumultuous interplay between humanity and the sea, often dramatizing the struggle through storms and shipwrecks. Bigert & Bergström's Wave Pillar revisits this theme, presenting a contemporary interpretation that merges the classical with the modern. Its form, reminiscent of victory columns like the famed Trajan's Column, employs a granite base and rippled texture to echo classical triumphs over nature, yet poses an open-ended narrative: Is it a nexus between sky and sea, or does it reflect the fragility of human existence, hinted at by a possibly wind-torn apex?

Adjacent to Carl Milles’ Sjöfartsgudinnan, Wave Pillar not only dialogues with Helsingborg's maritime legacy but also serves as a monument to the elemental forces of sea and wind, challenging the viewer to ponder our relationship with nature and climate in an era marked by environmental unpredictability.

Swarm

LED screens, generative custom software
Dimensions variable

Private commission, Italy, 2022

Swarm is a generative installation comprised of a series of LED screens displaying content in a constant state of transformation. Using a specific dataset, the work explores the intersection of nature and art, delving into the complex social waves exhibited by bees and the mesmerizing patterns they generate in nature.

Each LED cell within the installation, presented in a display reminiscent of honeycomb plates, is intimately connected to its neighboring cells, creating a dynamic wave-like effect that embodies the aesthetic of the natural world. The algorithm driving Swarm created by the artist’s studio is inspired by the computational principle of cellular automata, developed by the mathematician John von Neumann. Through this principle, the algorithm mimics the influence of neighboring units to reflect the intricacies of the natural world further.

BBQ Meteorite, 2022

Cast iron, stainless steel, concrete
3 meters / 15 feet tall

In the town of Sundbyberg outside of Stockholm, locals can now gather around Bigert & Bergström’s new social sculpture, BBQ Meteorite. Behind a housing complex, a meteorite in cast iron has struck down. Inspired by the Youndegin meteorite found in Western Australia in 1884, the heat-resistant sculpture thrones three meters above the ground, standing in a crater that inhabitants can use as a grill to cook BBQ or a campfire to congregate.

From creation to destruction, the flames from the inviting grill-crater tell several stories. Meteorites have been vital both to the birth of life and mass extinctions. The climate changes that erupted when the Chicxulub meteorite hit the Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago resulted in the extinction of three-quarters of the earth’s population, most conspicuously the end of non-avian dinosaurs—an event that prepares the stage for mammals and ultimately human life. Social activity, humor, menace, and contemplation are leitmotifs in the Swedish artist duo’s public social sculptures. Whether it is climate change or nuclear catastrophes, this time, the focal point is outer space.

The relationship between humans and celestial bodies goes far back. In Judeo-Christian tradition, the Baetylus (meaning “House of God”) are sacred worshipped stones, sometimes historically said to be meteorites. The Astro-worship of rocks existed in pagan Greek mythology; the center of the world, Omphalos, took the shape of a magical stone from Zeus. Sacred celestial stones are also seen in native Pueblo culture, such as the Winona meteorite found in an archaeological excavation of a traditional Sinagua burial site in Arizona in 1928.

The Astro-cult of pagan symbols continued in early modern times. In an Astro-political reflection on the Halley comet, the protestant reformer Melanchthon asked in a letter to famous German Astrologer and Chronicler Johann Carion in 1531 for his verdicts on the frightful space phenomena and its political implication. While the religious verdicts and mythological cult meanings of celestial bodies such as comets and meteorites represent the forces of destruction, creation, or epitaphic experience of deity, the meteorite, for modern man as so much else, becomes an object of exploitation.

Around the globe there exist meteorite hunters that look for fallen valuable space objects for a living. However, the hunt for rare minerals and metals doesn’t stop with these space cowboys. Because of resource depletion on earth, extracting elements from asteroids by space mining has become more than just an idea of science fiction. In 2022, NASAs succeeded in their Dart mission project, the first planetary space defense technology to move an asteroid in space. With his SpaceX project, Elon Musk plans to colonize Mars. Human control and exploitation of nature do not cease with the earth but are now beyond this world. Although space objects have lost their mythological power, they are still real existential threats to life on Earth. The fallen meteorite and burning crater of BBQ Meteorite becomes a visual symbol of the God-like homo Oeconomicu’s failure to control and predict the natural forces of outer space. 

The BBQ in a social role has long been associated with joy, parties, and family gatherings. However, in 2018 during the ever-record hot summer in Sweden because of climate change, the Swedish government declared a national grill prohibition. A single spark from the grill was enough to start an uncontrollable wildfire, in other words, BBQ parties became too hot.

The radiance of the fire in the reproduction of the 4.6-billion-year-old stone and flavors of grilled meats, corn, and vegetables, BBQ Meteorite invite locals to gather. Like the Omphalos, the grill and campfire become a navel to engage in thought-provoking conversations about the climate and the human quest to save the planet from space.

Heaven’s Gate (Megaplex), 2022

High-definition 3D video, loop. Color, sound.

Heaven's Gate is the latest in video artist Marco Brambilla's Megaplex series of video collages. A lavish and satirical take on the silver screen spectacle of Hollywood dreams and excesses, Heaven’s Gate both celebrates collective storytelling consciousness and satirizes its saturated glamour. The continuously looping video work ascends through the seven levels of Purgatory, each stage its own landscape of looping samples lifted from iconic moments of cinematic history.

"In the work, Brambilla makes visible the concomitant tensions present in religion, industry and celebrity, ascension and fall, innocence and experience, vanity and pageantry, sexuality and awakening, simplicity and excess. Speaking the language of Hollywood’s dream factory, it communicates a nostalgia that feels at once familiar and uncanny and seemingly appropriate to the mood of 2020, where media saturation created a convergence of fact and fiction in a voracious cycle of introspection and collective anxiety. Heaven’s Gate likewise unravels into a dreamlike spectacle of virtual chaos. The work produces an overpowering labyrinth of labyrinths, a sinuous spreading visual maze seems to encompass the past and the future. In some way it involves stars."

Extract from Daniel Birnbaum's essay "Marco Brambilla’s Labyrinth of Labyrinths"

Exhibitions & screenings

2022 Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam
Havana, Cuba

2022 PHI Center
Montreal, Canada

2021 Art Basel Miami
Miami, Florida

2021 The Standard
New York, New York

2021 Perez Art Museum Miami
Miami, Florida

2021 Frieze New York
New York, New York

Oculus, 2022

Generative Animation on LEDs embedded in solar panels (zero-energy media façade)
42.8m ø, 13.9m h / Total area, 1‘439.0m2

Novartis Pavillon, Basel, Switzerland, 2022

Oculus is a generative abstract animation that responds in real-time to data related to climate change. An algorithm, custom-designed by Studio Daniel Canogar, accesses a number of webpages that monitor different phenomena, including polar ice caps melting, carbon dioxide levels, active fire data, and global temperature anomalies. Oculus’ animation references this data through four different versions of color-coded graphics, with a visual vocabulary that artistically reinterprets traditional climate change visualizations.

Thanks to the internet we have a more complete understanding of climate change. The data culled from myriads of data entry points around the planet is giving us a bigger and more detailed picture of what is happening to our global ecosystem; however, the vast amount of information creates representational challenges. Oculus’ algorithmic animation moves beyond the hard numbers and structured graphics of climate-change data and instead creates a more emotional and sensorial experience of this climate information.

Brushstrokes, 2022

Generative artwork for LED-wall triptych Computer, webcams, custom-made software, LED screens
480 x 360 / 880 x 360 / 480 x 360 cm

Commissioned by Deka Bank, Frankfurt, Germany, 2022

Brushstrokes is a generative artwork featured on the LED screens in the lobby of the new DeKa Bank building on Lyoner Straße. The artwork is displayed as a continuous animation distributed on the 3 LED screens spanning the width of the lobby. Using custom-made software, Brushstrokes references abstract expressionism with painterly gestures that evoke this seminal movement that emerged in Europe and the United States in the 1950s. As a painting that never ceases painting itself, the artwork also incorporates geometries and forms that are clearly digital, becoming a conversation between analogue and electronic forms of creativity.

The color palette of the artwork consists of ten groups of 5 colors that appear on the screen at any given time. Each color grouping has been given a name, including “Desert”, “Deep Forest”, and “80s Funk”, with each group taking turns on the screen before seamlessly been taken over by the next cluster of colors. Approximately every 30 minutes, the “digital painting” dissolves and clears the LED “canvas” for a new animation to begin from scratch.

Four webcams strategically placed in the lobby capture the movement of employees and visitors as they walk by the LED screen. Their movements are transformed into linear paint splatters that usually appear in the artwork with bold and bright colors. These linear and bright shapes aid viewers identify the brushstrokes generated by the movement of the public as opposed to those created by the algorithm, which tend to have more irregular forms.

The Architecture of Plants, 2021

24-panel silkscreen print on glass
Commission for Brick and Machine,
Culver City, CA

The Architecture of Plants extends over the entire glass facade becoming an essential part of the building, integrated into the structure. Spanning from the ground floor entrance to the top floor, this photographic glass image merges with the facade: a juxtaposition of plants in relation to the geometric architecture of the rectangular window mullions. The seasonal altitudes of the sun project varying reflections on the adjacent walls.

The image–photographed from within the Freeman House in Los Angeles during Kellndorfer’s residency at Villa Aurora–shows a window through which one can see colossal vertical succulents pressing against the thin membrane of glass partially obstructing the urban Southern California landscape. The fragile mullions provide a horizontal structure to a perspective of layered urban elements along Highland Avenue. In this motif, Kellndorfer’s affinity for Californian modernist architecture merges with its special relation to nature, the blurring boundaries between inside and outside, and the Californian light.

These structure-giving building materials alongside the succulents transform into lines and frames, revealing diagrammatic ordering complexes that mediate between interior and exterior, architecture and vegetation, culture and nature while adhering to the conventions of a minimalist formal language. What kind of boundary can glass be? The work visualizes the confrontation between an untamed, wild vegetation outside and a sheltered, protected interior. When the primeval-looking cactus shoots threaten to overwhelm the facade of slatted windows, the delicate border between the here and now of apparent reality and the exterior fictionalized by the glass becomes palpable.

Throughout the course of a day, the work reveals itself differently depending on changes in light; the effects of natural and artificial light. Kellndorfer’s work doesn’t have a static aspect and will change according to the viewpoint of the observer, whether the viewer is inside or outside the building, whether they are close or viewing it from a distance. Scale is an important aspect of this work. The succulent’s size is exaggerated and gains an architectural dimension in relation to the existing structure and the viewer’s perspective.

The Architecture of Plants was overseen and commissioned as part of Culver City's Art in Public Places Program.

P R O P A G A N D A, 2021

Digital photograph, print on canvas, mounted on existing wooden panel/structure

Digital photograph, C-print, kinetic aluminum panel (rotating prismas, in one of the 3 faces, alternating with local advertising)

Site-specific installation at Inhotim and Brumadinho

“All Art is Propaganda”, George Orwell

PROPAGANDA, currently on view in Inhotim through August 2022, is part of the Inhotim Commissions program Território Específico [Specific Territory], in which artists are invited to develop new works based on their experiences with the institution and its surroundings. In this project, Lucia Koch simultaneously occupies spaces in the city of Brumadinho and the Instituto Inhotim, reflecting on the place of art and the logic of the dissemination of information. The work, as a continuation of Koch’s Fundos series, consists of interventions on outdoor billboards, which bring photographs of empty boxes and packages that the artist collected in Brumadinho and Belo Horizonte. The images were then presented on advertising supports that already existed in the city of Brumadinho and on billboards installed in Inhotim.

In Fundos, Koch began exploring the architectural characteristics of everyday objects, photographing the interiors of cardboard boxes used to package food, beverages and other typically mass-produced goods.

These images, often printed in large dimensions when displayed in exhibition spaces, become virtual extensions of the subject. The transformation by scale and angle in perspective create the effect of an invented place, whose holes and openings on the packaging reinforce the architectural illusion.

Fundos synthesizes methods and structuring questions of Koch’s practice, based on the relationship between art and architecture and on the use of banal objects to create effects and spaces, virtual or real, capable of renewing our perspective on these different spatialities, leading us to broaden the how we perceive the environment.

In the streets of Brumadinho, several billboards that usually show advertisements for real estate developments, luxury condominiums, or imported cars display images of empty interiors. The photographs of small boxes or packages, which are enlarged to an architectural scale, result in images of empty spaces of imprecise dimensions. They resemble familiar domestic spaces, living rooms, basements, and bedrooms. But despite the resemblance to living environments, nothing is for sale, there is no product to advertise.

This substitution of advertisements by images with no obvious function or explanation, and no text to mediate their presence, may pose some questions: what is the product being advertised? What is offered or communicated in these images? Are they images of projects maquettes or built spaces? What places are these? Over the course of a year, they may become part of the landscape.

As we find one image at a time, the set is formed in the experience with the city, which can happen daily for the locals, or occasionally, as they are also seen by visitors on the road connecting Brumadinho to Inhotim. Perceiving the recurrence of these images, which are repeated in both contexts—Brumadinho and Inhotim—we could try to find the same image again in another place. Equal and unequal.

PROPAGANDA echoes previous works the first of which was created in 2011 for Lyon Biennial: New Development was a 10 x 30 meter photographic panel, mounted at a large vacant lot next to the ruin of a silk factory, and seemed to advertise a real estate development on that site—the center of a massive gentrification process. The image, like other photographs from the Fundos series, showed an empty space, with white walls and zenithal light. Also, by the dimensions of the panel and the metallic structure built, the image suggested the vision of an empty stage.

The second titled Terrain de Proximité, a work exhibited in 2019 at the Rabat Biennale (Morocco), presented images of empty packages of a locally popular biscuit, show interiors coated in patterns and colors that we identify as African. Installed on both sides of the same panel, built at the edge between city and ocean, they create a zone of sociability that corresponds to the original sense of public space found in the title.

Those experiments with images blown up to an architectural scale, are the foundation of the project PROPAGANDA, though it addresses mostly to a local context: the economic and social shift that came a consequence of a tragic ecological disaster that happened in the area in 2019, when a mine dam collapsed and over 270 people were killed, most of them living in Brumadinho, employees of the company managing the iron mine. The compensations money provoked a secondary impact: a wave of consumption and publicity that affected much of the life in the city, apparent in the streets of Brumadinho.

In Brumadinho, these images are installed in familiar and typical places, which perhaps no one might question. Whereas installed in Inhotim, this urban advertising device introduces itself as a foreign body. What kind of publicity would make sense in the exclusive space of an Art Collection?

Dynamo, 2021

Flexible LED screen, computer, generative custom software, real-time data, metal structure

Expo Dubai, Spanish Pavillion, Dubai, 2021

Dynamo, a suspended artwork created for the atrium of the Spanish Pavilion at Expo Dubai 2020. Created in collaboration with the sound artist Francisco López, and produced In collaboration with the Spanish Agency for the Promotion of Cultural Projects, AC/E, the artwork is composed of sculptural screens that form three interlaced loops. Surrounding the artwork is a spiraling ramp that descends to the lower level of the atrium and allows the public to enjoy the artwork from multiple vantage points.

The public can interact with the sculptural screens via an interactive system built into the ramp’s handrail: hands placed under the handrail’s sensors translate into animated sparks on the screens. The more the public activates the sensors, the more vibrant Dynamo’s visual and acoustic content becomes. Mimicking the workings of an electromagnetic dynamo, the artwork eventually collects enough energy to generate a thundering visual and acoustic experience that resonates through the atrium. This moment captures the intense roar of so many machines of the past echoing through our modern history, technologies that we behold with a mixture of fear and fascination. The ecstatic discharge is followed by a calmer phase evocative of the circulatory systems of living entities. This quieter mode gives way to a new cycle of gradual buildup, in a repeating process of “collect and release” that is so much part of energy systems both biological and technological.

Dynamo is a meditation on the circulatory nature of energy and the synchronization of biological and technological systems. It is also an invitation for us to imagine and participate in the dynamos that will energize our future.

Termica, 2021

Flexible LED screen, computer, generative custom software, real-time data, metal structure

Private commission, Madrid, Spain, 2021

The artwork Termica, becomes a revealing conductor for real-time information on Madrid’s meteorological data, including wind velocity, temperature, atmospheric pressure, or humidity. The flow of information is represented by particles that draw their own trail, creating abstract forms that register the pulse of the city’s weather. The bigger it is the value of the data represented, the more meandering the trace will be. The size of the lines indicates the moment in which the data was registered: the more recent data corresponds to the thicker traces, and the slimmer to the older ones, as an echo of the past.

Unio Pictorum/Painter’s Mussel

Gold and bronze electroplated stanless steel mirrors, stainless steel, micro computer controlled LED-lights, water temperature and flow sensors

16 x 8 ½ x 6 ¼ feet, 485 x 258 x 188 cm

Commission for Stångåbro in Linköping, Sweden, 2021

Unio Pictorum/Painter’s Mussel is a work consisting of a 100:1 scale geometric version of a Painter’s Mussel, a mollusk on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. It is called Painter’s Mussel because the shell was historically used as a small palette for holding artist’s paint. Bigert & Bergström’s mussel will hold a light color spectrum on its shell, which changes with the fluctuation of the water quality in the creek below. The mussel is an imperative species for filtering the water and its shell functions as a climate archive by storing water data in its year rings. Nowadays, climate scientists study these shells to identify how the pH-value and oxygen level of the water have changed in the past. This work is an extension of the artist duo’s interest to publicly highlight overlooked animal species, which play an important role in biodiversity of the local site, but also for the climate in general.

Commission based on Goldstein Residence (light green), 2020

silkscreen on glass, 3 panels,
122 x 187 inches / 305 x 475 cm,
Los Angeles, CA.

Courtesy Michael Smith Inc.

In this recently commissioned work for a private client in collaboration with Micheal Smith Inc., Kellndorfer amalgamates her research on Brazilian Modernism with the Californian architecture of the '60s and '70s exploring John Lautner's Sheats Goldstein Residence. Kellndorfer investigates the origination and decay of architecture, which she relates to the formal qualities of modernist paintings.

Using her distinct technique of binding silk-screened photographic images onto large glass panels, Kellndorfer bridges the gap between photography, architecture, painting, and installation. Kellndorfer’s work examines the graphic quality of architecture and its relationship with the landscape, as well as the transformation of light and movement between interior and exterior space.

Her use of scale succeeds in engaging the viewer by altering perception and spatial relationships, dramatically enlarging the underlying motif. Reflections place the viewer within the images—glare and the spatial ambiguity created by cast shadows reveal a depth and complexity to the work.

“I am captivated by the notion of architecture as a projection onto a two-dimensional plane. In painting it is always the projection of space onto a surface—the back-projection of something three-dimensional onto a two-dimensional surface. The reflections on the glass allow the real space to interact with the printed space.” –Veronika Kellndorfer

Ballast, 2020

Stainless steel
42 x 52 x 30 feet
Commissioned by He Art Museum, Guangdong, China
Images courtesy of the artist

Growing out from the water pond surface in Crescent Garden of He Art Museum (HEM) stands Roxy Paine’s Ballast—a site-specific commission work within HEM’s permanent collection. Ballast is an attribution to Paine’s Dendroids series and the first large installation of this series to be displayed in Asia.

Its location in the Crescent Garden was planned in collaboration with Tadao Ando—the Pritzker prize-winning Japanese architect—to link the unusual architecture and surrounding outdoors. HEM commissioned Ballast in May 2018. In January 2020, Ballast put down its roots in the museum, becoming an integral part of HEM.

Heat Shimmer Wall (Fata Morgana), 2020

gold electroplated, mirror polished, and hammered stainless steel
89 x 8 ½ feet, 27 x 2.6 meters

Commission for St. Erik Eye Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, 2020

Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger

The natural rare phenomena responsible for creating a mirage—the illusion of heat and reflection—inspired Heat Shimmer Wall (Fata Morgana), commissioned for the St. Erik Eye hospital in Stockholm. This atmospheric disturbance affects the movement of light through the air, which changes the visual impression of an object or horizon.

The phrase Fata Morgana derives from Morgan le Fay of the Celtic legend of King Arthur. She had the special ability to create imaginary visions of castles out at sea, leading ships to sail off course. This legend later inspired sailors in the Strait of Messina, between mainland Italy and Sicily, to call mirages at sea Fata Morgana—“the Fairy Morgana”. The Swedish word for mirage, hägring, comes from the Gotlandish word Hägh, which above all means high—a reference to the mirage floating above the land or sea.

Heat Shimmer Wall takes this same raised position on a wall next to the eye hospital’s auditorium. It consists of a wavy golden mirror, 27 meters long and 2.3–2.6 meters high. Reflecting the surrounding interior, the mirror produces a funhouse mirror image that seems to move or jiggle. We are all familiar with the heat waves that rise off an asphalt road in summer and the twisted image of reality that this phenomenon creates. Heat Shimmer Wall (Fata Morgana) aims to activate the space, creating a similar optical illusion that allows viewers to interact with their own movement in the room.

KNOUN, 2014

Weathering steel alloy, 157 x 40 x 161 inches, permanent installation, 14th Street Bridge, Riverwalk Place, in Columbus, Georgia, 2020.

Image courtesy WC Bradley Co. / Associates.

KNOUN reveals itself as a two-pillar Form sited by the body of the viewer in relation to the work. Spanning 13 feet in both height and length, the KNOUN explores the moment in between sensory perception and definition and investigates balance and gravity. Though sculptural, Corday approaches these Protoist Forms with the mentality of a painter using the heat of a plasma torch in place of the paintbrush. Protoist is a term coined by Corday describing the intermediary state between the known and the unknown—the suspension of a moment between sensory perception and definition. 

The 14th Street Bridge is a historic closed-spandrel arch bridge built in 1921 recently renovated into a pedestrian bridge and highlighted by the WC Bradley Riverfront Place project. 

The bridge crosses over the Chattahoochee River connecting Columbus, Georgia to Phenix City, Alabama. Pedestrians will encounter the work as a permanent installation on the Columbus Georgia side of the 14th Street Bridge. The installation of this Protoist Form to note is one between material and geographic states. 

There is a history of Protoist works within relic infrastructures such as UNE––Corday's first sculpture at the New York High Line 508 W. 25th Street in 2008. KNOUN was previously included within the solo museum exhibition Protoist Series: Selected Forms at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014-2015).

The installation of KNOUN was overseen and organized by WC Bradley as part of the Riverfront Place development project.

Untitled (Sans Titre), 2020

F3125 A490 Type 3 Alloy,
30 x 110 x 30mm, 2 lb (.9kg)

Permanent installation, Crane Hall, Tokamak, Saint-Paul-Lez-Durance, ITER, France, 2020

Over the last three decades, thirty-five countries have joined together to build a momentary miniature sun on Earth. Each country has contributed different methodologies to achieve the same objects of construction. ART represents the thirty-sixth nation contributing a single object within the site’s millions of constructed components; its inclusion unites art and Science by its simple marker––Corday’s contribution exists as an unmarked materiality within the infrastructure. To develop the artwork, Corday worked with ITER directors to select an infrastructural object to exist within the steel structure that supports the mega-heavy components of the star.

The Artist-led ITER collaboration began in 2015. In summer of 2018, Corday was assigned the object known as the M30 Bolt to be made in F3125 Metal Alloy measuring 30 x 110 x 30mm with weight of 2 lbs/ .9 kg and was installed with intentional anonymity in November 2019 among the 80,000 of its same part supporting the structure surrounding the heart of the star: the Tokamak. Sans Titre takes the form of a metal alloy M-30 bolt, but to Corday it is stripped of its title and exists solely as a sincere material form within the device. The Art element is unseen yet known, creating a sustained physical presence at the very intersection of Art and Science that symbolizes both the literal and figurative support of Art to this chief global undertaking.

Bernard Bigot, Director-General of ITER, explains, "Much like Science, Art propels our collective culture forward. The material fusion of Art and Science aligns with the very essence of what we are aiming to achieve in developing hydrogen fusion as a sustainable source of energy for humankind.” In a symbolic act of this union, Bigot installed Sans Titre by hand into the ITER structure. He continues, “Christine Corday’s ‘sculpture’ joins ITER for the whole duration of the Project to represent Art as a pillar in this ambitious, collaborative and global feat of scientific and cultural advancement.

ITER construction will be completed in 2023 with an operational star in 2025. Corday’s two pound (.9kg) work functions as a sustained material moment or phase within the infrastructure of this star’s 400 acre site––humanity’s largest terrestrial achievement of the celestial.

Billow V, 2020

Flexible LED screen, computer, generative custom software, real-time data, metal structure
78 x 22.5 x 25.5 in / 198.1 x 57.2 x 64.8 cm

Commission for ING Bank in Madrid, Spain, 2020

Billow V, installed at the headquarters of the ING Spain Bank in Madrid features abstract animations created with real-time data from Google platforms, including Search interests, Knowledge Graph topics, trending YouTube videos, and Google News articles compiled from hundreds of newspapers and publications.

Colors within the animation are determined by how “hot” or popular a specific topic becomes; the more viral the search is online, the warmer the tones become. Popular queries from each day appear momentarily as overlaid text before dissolving into a smoky abstraction. Their lingering forms generate illusions of interlaced imagery.

The data sphere is a driving force of society and the economy, despite its invisible nature. This lack of visibility can make it difficult to comprehend how information affects daily life. Billow V attempts to expose the hidden threads of data networks.

Space Seed, 2020

bronze sculpture
8 ¼ x 6 ½ x 6½ feet, 250 x 200 x 200 cm
Commissioned by Kvalitena Aira in Stockholm, 2020

Photos: Jean-Baptist Béranger

Space Seed is an interactive sculpture about both birth and doom. Invites the visitors to crawl in and explore its interiors. The public work was commissioned by Kvalitena for Tommy Myllymäki’s restaurant Aira on Biskopsudden and inaugurated on 8th of October 2020. On the same day, when the Draconids meteor shower was expected to cause spectacular star falls in the evening sky over the entire Northern Hemisphere.

Meteorites are believed to have been of great importance for the origin of life on Earth but also caused mass extinctions. The climatic changes caused by the impact of the Chicxulub meteorite on the Yukatan Peninsula in Mexico, 65 million years ago are considered to be the main reason of the dinosaurs extinction.

The sculpture is 650 kg and the outer shell of it is dark brown, similar to the characteristic surfaces of the meteorites, which is a reminder of its journey through the Earth’s atmosphere before the violent impact when the exterior begins to burn from the heat generated by the friction. While the inside surfaces of the Space Seen are polished to a mirror finish, as a symbol or reference to the presence of life.

The sculpture is inspired by the Danish-Swedish architect and sculptor, Egon Möller-Nielsen’s work, The Egg (Tessinparken). By crawling around it, you can activate several senses, which is also the intention with the Space Seed. To playfully involve the passers-by in physical contact, into a story about this dramatic natural phenomena, as the artists formulated.

ANFORA, GROTESCO, ARMAZÓN, MANIQUÍ, An Exhibition on Pedagogy, 2019
Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid, Spain

Images courtest of the artist

Antonio Ballester's work, fundamentally pictorial, starts from iconographies linked to everyday life and to the primary expression of nature. Suns, rain, trees, plants, mountains or moons are elements represented following schematic, essential and austere procedures.

Since the beginning of his career, Antonio Ballester's artistic work has been accompanied by an inclination for pedagogy and participatory processes that, sometimes, have been part of his public presentations, as could be seen in his exhibition at La Casa Encendida in Madrid or in the last edition of the Sao Paulo Biennial, one of the most relevant events on the international calendar. In these exhibitions, his own work was shown together with the results of the workshops he carried out with children from very different contexts and social strata, and thus, along with his varied format paintings, watercolors and collages or mud mushrooms, wooden ducks appeared and free and lit chromatic pottery.

A few months ago, the Patio Herreriano Museum sent an invitation to Antonio Ballester to study the Ferrant Archive, which is part of the Contemporary Art Collection. The artist focused his interest on Ferrant's pedagogical methodologies, which in 1931 published a highly relevant text entitled “Design of a school configuration”, which came to overthrow many of the pedagogical conventions rooted for so many years in artistic teaching In our country.

As Javier Arnaldo, one of the highest authorities in Ferrant's artistic and pedagogical work, explains, the artist advocated “non-authoritarian training based on the principle of expressive freedom” with a system divided into three phases. The first of them, or initiation course, would be based on "experimentation and play with forms and materials"; the second and third would explore the transition between intuition and knowledge. Ferrant's text, Arnaldo continues, was never implemented by any public body, but it is an important confirmation of the “symbiosis between the sense of artistic creation that persuaded him and the learning dynamics required by art” that forged all his thinking.

GENESES
Elemental stainless steel, 360 x 384 x 79 in.
Commission for SFAC, Moscone Center,
San Francisco, CA, 2019

Work explores a straight line in curving space. GENESES is a commissioned work by the City of San Francisco for its Civic Collection permanently installed into the infrastructure of the city sited one block from SFMoMA. GENESES is a work of art and architecture in collaboration with SOM Architects--its form connects to the same sub-grade I-beams as the Architecture, as well as it’s poured concrete connecting materially to all city sidewalks.

GENESES is the first and unique work from a monumental series inspired by the concept of beginning. Its name is the phonetic fusion of the word in different languages. Its arcing segments are melted and hewn stainless steel supported by a concrete form. The work exhibits a cool planar edge and surface juxtaposed by the sensory examination of the grand-scale heat within its soft and epic melting cut. A heat allowing a material moment cooled or suspended between solid and liquid state, as well as mimicking the temperatures at the surface of the sun, the core of our earth. The work encourages touch, which is intended to provide a moment of respite and an engaged perceptual encounter.

Sun Shell, 2019

bronze electroplated stainless steel mirrors, pearl painted stainless steel, led-lights, heliostat, microcomputer
23 x 6 ½ x 6 ½ inches, 700 x 200 x 200 cm
Commission for the City of Norrtälje’s new square, Sjötullstorget, Sweden, 2019

Photos: Ulf Lundin

The Sunshell sculpture is representative of the mud snail shell, of the family Hydrobiidae—a commonly occurring species in the Baltic Sea—enlarged to a thousand times its natural size. It is a tiny snail that is found in numbers up to 10,000 on a single square meter of seabed. But despite its diminutive size, it is vital to the ecological balance along the Baltic shores, where it devours rotting plant fibers and serves as food for fish and seabirds.

Bigert & Bergström’s snail consumes the energy of the sun, reflecting it from its mirror-like copper shell as multiple spots of light scattered in different directions onto the surrounding public within the town square. The shell is also a sundial, its tall spiral shape forming the central obelisk on the city of Norrtälje’s new square, Sjötullstorget. Its shadow moves around the square throughout the day, revealing the current time.

The interior of the shell appears as an organic spiral of mother-of-pearl, striving towards the open-top, where currents of airflow in. Light also shines in through the top of the shell, and from the inside, the sun is always at its zenith. At the top is a heliostat—a mirror that follows the path of the sun thanks to computerized motors, reflecting the sun’s rays to the inner core of the shell.

The interior of Sunshell is comprised of steel with an iridescent coating, giving the surface a shimmering quality like mother-of-pearl. A snail’s shell formed from various minerals in the sea. Calcium and magnesium are two of the most important building blocks, and climate researchers are studying how snails build up their shells over time and what the chemical composition of the layers comprises. A snail builds its shell with a tiny layer every day. These “day rings” can provide a great deal of information, including the day’s temperature, which is determined by measuring the magnesium content of the ring.

If we want to gain insight into prehistoric climatology, the time rings of ancient sea snails take us significantly further back than ice cores and tree rings. By studying these creatures of the phylum Foraminifera, researchers have gazed into the biological event horizon from over 200 million years ago.

Dusk and Dawn, 2019
Lightbox with pigment print, dye-sublimation print on polyester curtains, variable dimensions

TEGNA Corporate Headquarters,
Tysons, VA


Light and air are the vital substances of a space, converting it into a place to be inhabited and transformed. Dusk and Dawn was created for an environment of coexistence and communication—though sound and air are isolated, transparent (glass) walls offer a visual continuity in between distinct spaces. For the TEGNA headquarters designed by the architectural firm Lehman Smith & McLeish (LSM), Koch created a work comprising a thirty foot LED back-lit color gradient lightbox that spans the height of the three-floor atrium. The lightbox establishes a dialogue with the free-flowing curtains installed on the opposing side of the atrium. The curtains, though separated by a floor, represent one continuous vertical color gradient establishing the overall unity of the work which represents the color transitions throughout the course of the day.

The draperies are a moving boundary, inviting people to interact and eventually redefine the configuration of the spaces they inhabit, experiencing the different atmospheres that the work creates. The back-lit panel has its color transition visible from all three levels—its light permeating the experience, occupying the room and constantly revealing a dialog with the natural light that washes the atrium during the day. Inhabiting the twentieth floor of the building, the monumental lightbox is visible from the surrounding area throughout the day and evening. These various interventions are thought of as a single unified work of art and are now in the permanent collection of TEGNA.

Terrain de Proximité, 2019
Prochainement, aujourd’hui, 2019

Pigment print on cotton paper, UV matte laminate

1st Biennale of Contemporary Art
Rabat, Morocco.
Photo: Lucia Koch

In Rabat, as a continuation of the project started at the Lyon Biennale 2011, the artist is installing monumental billboards in public space. The photographs of the interior of cardboard boxes, amplified to the point of transfiguring them, then become virtual spaces, imaginary extensions of the city.

The photographs Koch took of found boxes, presented on an architectural scale, are intended to be perceived as virtual spaces—extensions of the place where they are installed.

While walking in the streets of Rabat, Koch came across two cookie boxes turned over and photographed and titled the work Terrain de proximité. The motif that now dresses their internal walls is familiar: the geometry and the colors evoke both African and Brazilian visual culture.

Cachoeira, exhibited near the fountain of the Oudayas museum, was produced during a visit to a small town in southern Brazil in 2011. Koch had visited the bright fountains of Cachoeira do Sul 40 years ago and these "dancing waters" were drawn on from her memory and have since remained a powerful source of inspiration. The video installation shows 3 synchronized projections: in one we see a large image of the fountain, the waters dancing in a choreography that I created; the second is a vertical image of the colored stages of light and the third was filmed while the technician Bugre operated the shut-off valves underground to turn the water on and off. The song Chuá Chuá has been part of the original soundtrack of the fountain since its inauguration and has been my guide for the entire work.

Koch states, “if Cachoeira addresses the origin of things, billboards announce an uncertain future that can only be experienced in the present moment.”

Coming soon / today are words displayed on the marquee of the Cinema 7th Art Theatre announcing current and future films. The characteristic an old camera’s bellows were the source of inspiration for the work as it relates to the similar shape of the cinema building’s interior that people usually can't see creating a dialogue between the camera and the environment the footage captured is to be viewed.

Aqueous, 2019

Flexible LED screen, computer, generative custom software, real-time data, metal structure
12 x 11 x 1/3 feet

The Sobrato Organization, Mountain View, California, 2019

Aqueous is a video triptych that features an abstract animation. The liquefied images that appear on the screen are created with YouTube videos. Aqueous can potentially use the over 4 billion videos presently in the service, creating an infinite pallet of ever-changing combinations.

A wireless keyboard placed in proximity to the screens allows users to enter a query. The artwork then downloads the first 100 videos on YouTube that appear under the selected search and abstracts them into liquid forms. Certain details remain recognizable– a face, a hand, an automobile – in the constantly mutating amorphous shapes being generated by the artwork. Periodically, the YouTube videos that form the abstraction are momentarily revealed for 10 seconds, allowing viewers to grasp the source images that form the abstraction.

The triptych format references a rich art-historical tradition of three-panel paintings in European altars. As a technological altar, Aqueous evokes the religious-like devotion our culture has to YouTube, a veritable oracle we consult for all matters, from the banal to the profound. The streaming service has had a deep impact on the visual culture of the 21st Century, becoming the most significant visual encyclopedia of our times. Aqueous is part of a series of projects in which the artist explores how knowledge is being created, stored and distributed in the digital age.

RELATIVE POINTS
Twelve 11,200 lb. iron grit compressions,
53 x 49.75 x 53 in.
Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, 2019

Images: Dusty Kessler

Christine Corday combines the sciences with the fine arts to create a unique body of work that investigates the very stuff and definition of space and the universe. Her site-specific installation at CAM—Corday’s first solo show exhibited inside a museum—is anchored by RELATIVE POINTS, a twelve-piece installation of monumental works.

Each of the RELATIVE POINTS is fashioned through a cold-cast process compressing 10,000 pounds of elemental metal and metalloid grit into form. The sculptures will be placed in the gallery in a “non-random constellation” designed by the artist.

The outer edges of the sculptures have various levels of permanence—with some of the surface layers eventually changing shape, sloughing off, or even crumbling as a consequence of subtle friction produced by visitor interaction. No matter what the construction and life of the works, Corday is insistent that each be touched by viewers, underscoring the importance of the human body in completing the work of art.

The solo exhibition also includes Primer Grey, Centers for Gravity (2016-2018): works collecting paint covering its plane into a resulting mass or mark within an intimate pull of gravity to Earth’s core. In these works, primer serves as color and medium connecting one work materially to the other; one without privilege over the other.

Christine Corday: RELATIVE POINTS was organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by the executive director Lisa Melandri. The exhibition was sponsored by National Endowment of the Arts, Barrett Barrera Projects, Penny Pennington and Mike Fidler, Alexandria and Peter Strelow. Additional support provided by Ann Ruwitch and John Fox Arnold. The Artist Talk was generously supported by the Robert Lehman Foundation. Special thanks to Christopher Powers, Paul Henry McMahill, Jack Palmer, George Murello, and Jeff Hartz.

Casa de Vento, 2019

Casa de Vidro, São Paulo, Brazil

Koch has installed her site-specific work directly on the facade of the modernist home, creating a dialogue throughout the space through free-flowing, curtains which transforms the appearance of the structure and alters the interior space through light. Koch's intervention implements color gradients of amber and blue emulating the color temperature variations of the natural light throughout the day, shifting the viewers experience as they move throughout the home. Koch’s strategy elevates elements of architecture throughout the home effecting the physical surroundings and forming a relationship with the existing space.

Considered an icon of modern architecture in Brazil, Casa de Vidro was the first project built by the Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi. Bo Bardi along with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi lived in the house for over 40 years. The Casa de Vidro has earned this name for its imposing glass facade that seemingly floats on pillars. The garden of Casa de Vidro, which occupies an area of ​​7,000 square meters, expresses the couple's love for Brazilian natural beauty and culture. The paths surrounding the home, decorated with stones and ceramic shards, meander through the forest planned and planted by Lina herself.

In addition to its significance as an architectural landmark, Casa de Vidro has become a meeting point for artists, architects and intellectuals. Max Bill, Steinberg, Gio Ponti, Calder, John Cage, Aldo van Eyck and Glauber Rocha found the ideal space for cultural, ideological and social discussions at the residence of the Bardi couple. Casa de Vidro is a space for research and exchange of ideas among researchers, professionals and students from Brazil and abroad. Tombada by CONDEPHAAT in 1987, today it houses the headquarters of the Institute Lina Bo and PM Bardi, whose aim is to promote and disseminate architecture, design, urbanism and Brazilian popular art, keeping the couple's thinking and work alive in the Brazilian cultural scene.

Post hoc, 2019
Mixed media installation
58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy

Continuing his investigation into alternative and otherworldly knowledge, Dane Mitchell’s Post hoc explores the realm of phenomena which no longer exists. Over the course of two years Mitchell has researched and amassed a list comprised of millions of bygone things ranging from abandoned oil rigs (40,000 and counting), black holes, former nations and extinct species—a startling recent report puts this number at over one million. The names of these departed things are broadcast from within the Palazzina Canonica on the Riva dei Sette Martiri to four sites across Venice. The lists of lost and extinct entities are announced continuously by an artificial voice from within an anechoic echo-free chamber at the Palazzina to various locations throughout the city and beyond.

A poetry of the bygone, this inventory is transmitted to commercially produced ‘tree’ cell towers situated at the Palazzina and in specific locations throughout Venice. These artificial pine trees commonly referred to as 'Frankenpines' are nodes in a communication network, each tree communicating audibly to listeners who can also connect to the unceasing signals via their phones.

Post hoc forms an invisible but audibly unique historical record that needs to be experienced in multiple locations. Beyond the Palazzina the transmitters are stationed at locations that relate to ideas of invisibility, transformation and loss. One receiving tree tower is situated in a green open-air courtyard of the working hospital and clinic Ospedale Civile di Venezia, an operating hospital in a notable building imbued with intangible infections and medical cures and containing a Museum of Anatomy and Library. Another tree is found infiltrating the entrance to Università Iuav di Venezia, the university of architecture, a site of speculative knowledge. One tree stands amidst the remains of Venetian maritime history in the North Arsenale and another broadcasts from within Parco Rimembranze, Sant’Elena in a garden originally planted to commemorate the fallen in World War I. The regular electromagnetic transmissions of entries in the lists emitted from the tree towers comprise an intangible sculptural field across Venice, a quality shared by many of Mitchell’s projects.

The enormous scale of Post hoc’s content is evident in the empty library on the second floor of the Palazzina, where the measure of loss is visible in the lists that are being printed in sync with the broadcasts. The printed paper slowly scrolls and fills the historic library over the duration of the exhibition, making the printed contents of the lists almost impossible to view over time. Overall, Post hoc confounds any empirical census or rationale and the listener is left to determine their own relationship to this invisible or lost past.

Post hoc will remain forever ungraspable and inconclusive. To hear the work in its entirety would require listening eight hours a day over the entire seven months of the Biennale Arte 2019. Post hoc is also incomplete in nature with unrelenting new losses and extinctions occurring as the present becomes the past. The digital tree towers also exemplify this obsolescence by becoming outdated in the face of the accelerating pace of technological development.

Vento / Wind, 2019

25 meters (overall height) x 6 meters

Edificio Peninsula, Porto Alegre, Brazil

Edificio Peninsula, designed by Cantergiani + Kunze Architects, is built on a long narrow lot in the Historic Center of Porto Alegre. The lot remained empty for decades and contained only the rugged topography of the hill and native vegetation. It’s inhabitance now includes artists, hairdressers, therapists and the architects of the project. 

Vento is an architectural intervention installed on the facade of this iconic building in Porto Alegre. Koch designed the curtains to occupy the exterior of each floor exposing the work to sunlight, rain and wind. Composed of a sheer printed fabric, the curtains are transparent enough to preserve the enviable views of Lake Guaíba. As the wind blows, the affected fabric stirs and flows, taking on life like qualities. Each curtain has a varied gradient that filters the sunlight, creating a series of translucent layers of chromatic transitions which combined establish the unity of the overall work. Koch’s strategy elevates basic elements of architecture to effect a change in the physical surroundings and form a relationship with the existing space.

Uma boa ordem, 2019

“Ecomuro 8” clay brick modified with 9, 18 and 24 degrees sections, Variable measures

Fundacíon Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido, Mexico

Uma boa ordem is a collaboration between Lucia Koch and Héctor Zamora. It was presented for the first time in 2006 during the 27th edition of the Sao Paolo Bienal. The site specific work was adapted for the gardens of Casa Wabi. The five walls consisting of clay construction blocks replicate an undulating wave pattern popular in 1950s Brazilian architecture.

Uma boa ordem challenges the limits of space, oscillates between transparency and opacity, and forms paths through and across the environment. The walls operate as communication apparatus between observers. It prompts the viewer to perceive the environment from different vantage points through the overlapping geometric patterns, producing a framing for the landscape. The walls in Uma boa ordem filter the sunlight throughout the day, accentuating the layers of superimposed shadows and light, throughout the installation.

Koch and Zamora explore the relationship between the rigid concrete exterior of Casa Wabi and the fluid motion of the self-contained, curved walls of their intervention, where the air and light freely circulate. They redefine the space, multiplying the possibilities of observation. Uma boa ordem generates an open and traversable ambience, where the structure harmonizes with the surroundings.

Weather Field No. 2, 2018

49 stainless steel poles, weather vanes, and anemometers, approx. 20' 1 7/8'' x 13' 9'' x 23' 7 1/2'' (overall). Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. University purchase, Art on Campus fund.

Images and video courtesy of Jean Paul Torno.

Weather Field No. 2 is a site-specific sculpture composed of 49 telescoping stainless steel poles aligned in a highly ordered grid. Alternating in height, each pole supports a weather vane and anemometer. The tight grouping of the poles augments the instruments’ standard function of gauging wind speed and direction. Instead of only mapping the wind conventionally, the sculpture also uses crowding as a condition to trigger and reveal turbulence, a mysterious phenomenon. 

The sculpture strikes a balance between the order of the instrument grid and the unpredictable energetic forces produced within its own microclimate. In this peculiar condition the instruments influence and react to one another, flocking and schooling within the vortices that they themselves produce.

Weather Field announces itself from a great distance as well as a number of vantage points in its setting. The rigid verticality of the stainless steel sculpture contrasts and compliments both the landscaping beneath it and the natural forces at play in its canopy. Depending on which way the viewer approaches the sculpture; the poles may align themselves as a transparent set of columns, or may reveal themselves to be a random cluster of slender elements.

As such Weather Field serves to gauge the viewer’s movement and provide coordinates as they navigate the site or contemplate the atmosphere. It serves as constant reminder of our connection to both local and global environments and may conjure thoughts of the subtle affects we have on one another.

Nude Descending a Staircase No.3, 2018

High-definition video, loop. Color, sound.
Oculus World Trade Center, New York, New York, 2019

Nude Descending a Staircase No.3 moves the iconic Duchamp painting (Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2) into the dimension of time. The illusion of movement in the painting is explored as layers of figures collaged onto a panoramic digital canvas constantly reconfigure themselves to cascade down an unseen stairway. The figures, shapes and color palette are pure cubism, now expanded into three dimensions using stateof-the-art machine- learning technology. The original 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase No.2 is a rare case where an artist originally drew from a “new” technology (Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic time-studies) as an inspiration for a painting. By taking the original Duchamp painting back into the technological realm and adding the dimension of time, Brambilla completes the circle and pays homage to the deconstructed image using a wholly contemporary visual language.

Installations

2022 Frieze New York
presented by Maison Margiela
New York City, New York

2021 Design Miami
presented by Maison Margiela
Miami, Florida

2019 Frieze Art Fair
Oculus World Trade Center
New York, New York

2019 Némo Biennial
EP7
Paris, France

2019 ‘New Cubism’ by Future City
The Gallery at Foyles
London, United Kingdom

2019 Arcade
London, United Kingdom

Flume, 2022

UV-Cured Textured Wall Media
10 1/2 x 37 feet

Corporate Office, San Diego, CA 2022

The Flume murals evoke a sense of how Data has become a lifeline for our cities, much like rivers helped populations flourish along their banks in the past. Studio Daniel Canogar custom-designed an algorithm that captured data connected to the San Diego region, including the San Diego River’s water levels, local power supply and demand, the census, the city’s demographics, average temperatures, precipitation, UV index, as well as information on recent earthquakes and the flow of traffic. Once all this information was gathered, the algorithm modeled the data into a liquid-like animation reminiscent of the topographic contours of a river. The resulting images reveal a multicolored and multilayered text-based abstraction.

Dynamo!, 2018

Open Spaces, Kansas City, MO
aluminum, steel, wood, tempered colored glass, speakers

Images courtesy of Timothy Amundson

Dynamo! is a site specific installation in Kansas City, for the first biennial of Open Spaces — an expansive, city wide performing and visual arts experience curated by Dan Cameron. Koch transformed the site of this installation, a vacant lot adjacent to The Call newspaper, through a sculptural intervention. 

The Call, an esteemed institution of national reputation and importance for the African-American community in Kansas City, serves as the motivating source for this project. Known throughout the midwest as an empowering voice for marginalized black communities, The Call also fought segregation and discrimination in education, housing, employment, and the use of public facilities. Charged by decades of echoing stories and lives, Koch's attraction to the beauty of this vacant space becomes clear in her response to the neighboring building's modern characteristic. 

Inspired by the facade of The Call building, the canopies, comprised of tempered glass panels varying in saturation and shade, create color transitions that change from one zone to another. From below, these colorful patterns resemble a dance floor while their corresponding shadows project color fields along the ground, shifting with the changing light throughout the day. Responding to local architecture, Koch transforms this social environment by harnessing the power of light and color affecting the viewer's experience of time and space. 

Koch’s project incorporates sounds created and compiled in collaboration with Rio de Janeiro musician and composer Domenico Lancellotti.

Prototype for Stellar Interloper (Silver Surfer), 2018

Zachry Engineering Education Complex,
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
carbon fiber fabric, resin, aluminum alloy foil
40 x 10 x 10 feet, 12.2 x 3 x 3 meters

Images and video courtesy of Texas A&M College of Engineering

Prototype for Stellar Interloper (Silver Surfer) for Texas A&M University is an aesthetic conjecture of forces giving shape to an elusive yet dramatic representation of the college’s varied pursuits and the aspirations of its students. The sculpture speaks to various areas of inquiry and research, and leaves its interpretation open to the eye and the mind. It is a meditation on the fluid dynamics of liquids and gas, or revolving topology of surfaces, or vortex mechanics, or the forces of comprehension and tension, and it certainly calls to mind aeronautical design, and yet it is not confined to any single area of study.

Wonderment is the key to apprehending the work upon entering the atrium. It leverages contemplation and attention, and acknowledges scrutiny and thought as the basis for any inquiry. The 40ft tall by 10ft diameter sculpture appears to float in the space, while its twisting shape instills balance between movement and suspended animation.

common/sense, 2018
33rd Bienal de São Paulo

Photos: Pedro IvoTrasferetti / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

Antonio Ballester Moreno approaches his curatorial project for the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo as a way of contextualising a universe based in the close relationship between biology and culture, with references to the history of abstraction and its interplay with nature, pedagogy and spirituality. For this purpose, he brings together the work of philosophers, scientists and artists in an exhibition wich encompasses educational toys from historical avant-gardes, artworks from Escuela de Vallecas and works by contemporary artists. Ballester Moreno notes:

We are all different. Each person sees the world in a different way.

When we move, we also move our world. What surrounds us at each moment is part of a private universe that moves along with us. The environment makes the world.

This said, and fully aware of the myriad languages of the particular world of art, here we are concerned with what unites us – an experience in common that shares the most essential customs of our own nature and of the nature that surrounds us, which we are inevitably part of.

To recover the continuity between the aesthetic experience and the natural processes of life in order to dissolve dualist thinking – fine art versus folk art, the aesthetic versus the practical, or the artist versus supposedly “normal” people – implies accepting the separation between things and people, thoughts and feelings, humanity and nature, the self and the world.

All lives, without exception, are creative, and the purpose of every creation is not pure truth, or self-contained knowledge, but simply the improvement of existence.

Because seeing things united, in their infinite diversity, is more enriching and satisfying. 

Untitled, 2018
MAMO, Marseille, France
chameleon paint on metal flats
80 meters (width)

Photos: We are content(s)

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of its opening in 2013, MAMO (Marseille Modulor) invited Olivier Mosset to create an installation on the rooftop of Le Corbusier's La Cité Radieuse. Mosset created a monumental monochrome work that embodies the research in painting that he has undertaken throughout the course of his career.

Begun in the 1960s alongside Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni as part of B.M.P.T., Olivier Mosset has rigorously pursued his practice of deconstructing painting for more than fifty years. Striving for a form of paintng that references only itself and its history as a medium, Mosset throws into question notions of craftsmanship, originality and the alleged uniqueness of each work. In so doing, he approaches the limits of painting itself.

Mosset's installation was specifically produced for the rooftop terrace of La Cité Radieuse. More accustomed to in-situ works that take the form of wall paintings, Mosset covered the existing 18 meter wall with metal flats painted with chameleon paint and baked to produce reflections that act as a unique tribute to the Summer sun of Marseille. Each step taken alongside this installation inspires reflections on ephemeral reality, contrasted by the robustness, immutability and tangibility of the physical nature of the work.

Judy’s Hand Pavillion, 2018

Steel, fiberglass, paint, concrete 7’ x 10’ x 25’. Toby’s Plaza, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH

Image courtesy of FRONT Studio.

In a collaborative effort, FRONT International and Putnam Collection of Case Western Reserve University commissioned Tony Tasset to develop a project for the Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art’s first citywide exhibition. Judy’s Hand Pavilion lends itself as a dramatic public shelter and gathering place in Toby’s Plaza, made possible by the support of alumna Toby Devan Lewis, a local author, art curator and philanthropist. 

The sculpture is an enlarged representation of the hand of Tasset’s wife,  Judy Ledgerwood, who is a celebrated contemporary painter. The work functions as both architectural intervention and civic monument underscoring art’s ability to affect its environment and engage the viewer. Judy’s Hand Pavilion reveals itself both at a distance and from multiple vantages enlisting scale as a relational aesthetic. The hand’s exterior material is fiberglass; its fingers filled with concrete. Moveable seating will be installed around the work to create a space to congregate amidst the 34,000-square-foot plaza.

A Longa Noite, 2018
SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, Brazil

A Longa Noite (The Long Night) is a site-specifc installation at SESC Pompeia. The work was created for the 3rd edition of Expanded Plan – a project that proposes the creation of interventions that present and problematize current issues of artists' authorial production and fundamental elements of language in the context of contemporary art.

Specially designed to occupy the theater hall, the intervention responds to the local architecture and proposes a temporary transformation of space. A color filter covers the huge glass roof of the environment, imposing a constant violet light that affects the viewer's experience of space and time. As Koch notes:

"Night is the place of anxiety and anticipation. We only endure the night because we anticipate the day, just as we cross the day with dusk. If the color of light does not change, we are stuck in this state of suspension."

The intervention also adds to the site hundreds of wooden rods, which echo the structural elements of the trusses used in Lina Bo Bardi's architecture. Arranged in apparent disorder, as if waiting for a definite destination, the stems are painted red, the color that most stands out under the filter. The artist invites the public to wear red clothes to visit the work.

Tendril, 2017

Flexible LED screen, computer, generative custom software, real-time data, metal structure
10.7 x 12.5 x 3.7 m / 12 x 35 x 41 feet

Tampa International Airport, Tampa, Florida, 2017

Tendril is a permanent installation created for Tampa International Airport which emerges from the artist’s fascination with representations of ruins that depict nature reabsorbing what was built by humans. The artwork is composed of ribbon-shaped LED screens that coil around the trusses of Airside F’s central space in the airport. Tendril evokes the coiling shapes of vines curling around a trellis. The videos screened on the artwork depict a rich variety of native South Florida vines.

Tendril’s video animations suggest vigorous reclamation of territory, shifting from fast invasive gestures to tranquil sequences of species settling into their new home. The native plants are invited into the interior of the airport, thus connecting indoor with outdoor space. The abstract animation, spread over the artwork, is generative and forever changing, thus becoming a work of endless combinations.

Tendril was developed in collaboration with the University of South Florida’s Botanical Garden.

Once Upon a Time in the West, 2017
Commission for Murals of La Jolla
La Jolla, CA

The mural pays homage to La Jolla’s landmark contribution to science and architecture, The Salk Institute designed by Louis Kahn. Kahn was handpicked by Jonas Salk to design a flexible laboratory space that would be conducive to the constantly evolving needs of science. By layering contrasting opaque and transparent forms, Ezawa seamlessly blends Kahn with his creation, suggesting the endless possibilities of science and art. 

Sunset Box, 2017
The Sky Looks Very Different Today, 2017
Progressive Corporation, Mayfield, OH
prints on adhesive film

Images courtesy of the Progressive Corporation Art Collection

Each year the Progressive CEO chooses a theme surrounding the annual report and then selects art that reflects and complements that theme. Lucia Koch was invited to create two site-specific installations reflecting the theme of transition for the Visitors Center lobby.

Koch explores how we can change the spaces we inhabit through subtle means, whether it’s through her large-scale photographs of the inside of consumer packaging that create the illusion of rooms or site-specific installations where she transforms spaces through color and light. To represent the theme of transition, Koch used colored filters to paint the Visitors Center of Progressive’s headquarters in natural light, providing a new experience of the space for all who move through it.

Koch covered the vestibule of the Visitors Center in gradients of azure and sun-orange to create Sunset Box. In the skylight, Koch installed The Sky Looks Very Different Today  —  its brilliant reds and yellows observable from the surrounding offices. As sunlight passes through the lobby, light is filtered through the gradients, intensifying the space and illuminating the transition between inside and outside, as well as the transition of time. Also prominently featured in the lobby, is one of the artist’s large-scale photographs, titled Popcorn, which creates the illusion of an extra room extending from the back wall. These works are a permanent addition to Progressive’s growing collection of contemporary art. 

Long Live the Free Fields of Spain!, 2017
La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain

Images courtesy of La Casa Encendida

The exhibition Long Live the Free Fields of Spain! is an invitation to contemplation extended by thirty large-scale canvases across two installations, in which the artist calls upon his visual language based on geometry, pedagogy and nature.

The title Long Live the Free Fields of Spain! comes from a phrase uttered by sculptor Alberto Sánchez during a walk in the countryside on the outskirts of Madrid. The juxtaposition of the modern and rural worlds of 1940s Spain acts as a catalyst for Ballester Moreno’s installation, which cohesively represents the autumn season through paintings of rain, the sun, the moon and trees. The elements comprising these paintings refer to basic geometric shapes with lines and strokes reminiscent of early avant-garde artists such as Paul Klee, Joan Miró and Josef Albers.

Mondrian Meets the Beatles, 2017
San Francisco International Airport
Commission of San Francisco Arts Commission for the Collection of the City and County of San Francisco
wood-cut wall-mounted sculpture

Images: Ethan Kaplan Photography, 2017

Mondrian Meets the Beatles was commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission for the San Francisco International Airport. Part of Ezawa's Geometry of Rock and Roll series, in which visionaries in the fields of visual arts and music are paired, the woodcut, wall-mounted sculpture combines a rendering of a photograph of The Beatles exiting an airplaine in San Francisco on their first US tour in 1964 with Piet Mondrian’s Composition C (1935).

By combining the archival image with an abstract composition, the work attempts to free the photograph of its documentary status and to add a narrative to a set of primary color fields. The sculpture also imagines a meeting that never happened between a painter and a musical group that each revolutionized their respective fields.

Solar Egg, 2017

stainless steel mirrors with titanium gold color coating, steel, stone, wood, brass, glass, LED’s, solar panels, batteries, rubber
19 ½ x 18 ½ x 15 feet, 588 x 567 x 455 cm
Commissioned by Riksbyggen, installed at Luossabacken, Sweden, 2017

Photos: Jean-Baptiste Béranger

In response to a commission from Riksbyggen, Bigert & Bergström have created a sculptural chamber in the form of an egg-shaped sauna that was installed at Luossabacken in Kiruna, Sweden’s northernmost town.

Kiruna is currently undergoing a radical transformation, which involves a gigantic move for the entire town. This is so that the mining company LKAB can extract more of the iron seam that cuts diagonally downwards beneath the town. The iron ore is and has been—ever since it first was extracted at the end of the 19th century—an important source of income for Sweden, and absolutely vital for the town of Kiruna. No mine, no town. But the breaking up and devastating transformation of the landscape, the environment, and the architecture caused by the move are also sparking a lot of debate. Solar Egg has been made as a social sculpture where locals and visitors can meet and discuss these challenges.

In the arctic climate of Lapland, the sauna occupies a key position, as a room for warmth and reflection. B&B have taken this tradition and developed a sculptural symbol that prompts thoughts of rebirth and an incubator that nurtures conversation and an exchange of ideas. The project is a continuation of the artists’ strategy to incorporate climate into the narrative and experience of the artwork, which was started with the Climate Chambers in 1994.

The egg is constructed of stainless golden mirror sheeting, its multifaceted form breaking up the surroundings that it reflects into a multiplicity of different mirror images. Landscape, mine, town, sky, sun, and snow are combined into a fragmented image that evokes associations with the complexity spanned by today’s discussion about climate and sustainable community development.

The egg’s interior is formed out of wood, with the wall panels and floor decking made of pine and the bench of aspen. In the center of the egg stands the wood-heated, heart-shaped sauna stove made of iron and stone. The temperature inside the egg varies between 75° and 85° Celsius.

Christine Corday: Protoist Series, Selected Forms
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015

Photo: LACMA/Museum Associates

Protoist Series, Selected Forms was Corday’s first solo presentation at an American museum and the culmination of her work using the heat of a plasma torch in place of the paintbrush. Protoist is a term coined by Corday describing the intermediary state between the known and the unknown—the suspension of a moment between sensory perception and definition.

The series focuses on temperature, material states, and the sensory effect of touch with abstract form. The two artworks in the exhibition, UNE and KNOUN, exist as recording devices—every hand that touches them leaves an impression which, over time, results in the form of rust, mapping an intimately individual yet shared public surface. Corday’s approach, manipulating matter in and out of different states, produces resulting forms that attract and collect the viewer’s hands and perception, bringing collected memories to the surface.

Protoist Series: Selected Forms was commissioned and organized by Michael Govan, Director; Franklin Sirmans, Head Curator; and Holly Harrision, Curator. The exhibition was sponsored by the Lannan Foundation with support by KC Fabrications and Special Thanks to Samara Whitesides.

Deer, 2015

Fiberglass, steel, paint. 12 x 20 x 8 feet. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.

Deer, is composed as a nervous and pensive monumental fawn ready to make her move. The surreal juxtaposition of the supersized deer emerging from the woodland dramatizes the relationship of what it means to be human, the identity of sculpture and their respective places in nature. Tasset explains Deer “as a work that represents the highest conceptual ambitions with a delightful populist twist.” 

Deer’s size suggests how nature is out of balance in today’s urban and suburban spaces, and how humans have impacted the other species around us. In many ways, Tasset’s Deer is emblematic of the Park itself. The deer population is a silent and near invisible audience. This cunning work explores how we collectively dwell in the landscape but also celebrates the unique environment created when art frames nature.

Commission for the Bruxelas Building, 2015
São Paulo, Brazil
laminated sliding glass panels

For the corporate building, Koch designed colorful and interactive panels on the ground floor to complement the Modernist-inspired design of the building. The sliding glass panels, laminated with translucent color prints, allow people to move between them, giving rise to different shades and hues reflected on the structure.

Prototype for Re-Entry, 2015
Commission for the Art in Architecture Program, Fine Arts Collection, U.S. General Services Administration, Silver Springs, MD
fiberglass, aluminum, GSM metal coating and stainless steel

Photos: Carol M. Highsmith Photography

This sculpture is the culmination of an extensive collaboration between artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and the scientists and engineers of the Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) at the historic White Oak Campus.  Prototype for Re-Entry is an enlarged version of Constantin Brancusi’s famous sculpture Bird in Space (1923 – 26).  Analyses of a model of Brancusi’s sculpture at MACH 10 (ten time the speed of sound) were performed at AEDC’s Hypervelocity Tunnel 9.  These tests submitted the model of Brancusi’s iconic artwork to actual shockwaves as it might experience during a theoretical re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere from a hypothetical orbit.

Manglano-Ovalle’s conceptual approach to creating this artwork mirrors the FDA’s own rigorous analyses of the foods and medicines that propose to enter our bodies.  His sculpture also references the transition of the White Oak Campus from pre-World War II munitions testing facility to state-of-the-art laboratories and administrative headquarters of the FDA.  Suspended in flight, Prototype for Re-Entry posits innovation as having its own critical trajectory, continually accelerating in relation to our contemporary condition as well as our aspirations.

La temperatura del aire, 2015
Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Caja de Burgos, Spain
pigment print on silk and rayon

In La temperatura del aire Koch modified the way the rooms of the Contemporary Art Museum Burgos were perceived by installing six large silk curtains of different color intensities, creating a series of translucent layers of chromatic transitions that could be passed through by the viewer.

Together with this installation, Koch also exhibited video works in which light is an essential element. The first, entitled Cachoeira, stems from a wonderful, lucid memory from her childhood, in which light and water dance together in a colorful fountain. The video installation consists of three simultaneous image projections showing the fountain at dawn, a detail of the steps next to it bathed in colored light, and a technician turning on the mechanism that operates the fountain.

The second of the pieces, Night Fever, is a single channel high-definition video, created in 2010. It belongs to the “Fundos” series in which the artist distorts the scale and material characteristics of boxes and bags, utilizing the properties of photography and film to change our perception of reality.

Symbiosis, 2011/2014

stainless steel
34 foot height

Acquired by the Association for Public Art through a grant from the Daniel W. Dietrich II Trust, Inc. Installation funded by Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson

Images courtesy of the artist and James Ewing Photography

Hand-fabricated from thousands of pieces of stainless steel pipe, plate, and rods, Symbiosis suggests both ecological and anatomical branching systems. The forms evoke arboreal structures, vascular systems, synaptic networks, and industrial pipelines

Rising 34 feet high, the more than 3 1/2 ton sculpture was created from standard industrial piping that was welded, formed, and polished in the artist’s studio to create two shimmering, interrelated organic forms that both buttress and weigh on one another, referencing the darker aspects of nature and the fierceness of its laws. Symbiosis represents the collision of two dendroids that result in stasis, a questionable relationship that teeters between support and detriment.

Artists Monument, 2014

Etched acrylic, steel shipping containers.
96” x 960” x 96”. Whitney Biennial,
Chicago, IL.

Constructed from enamel-filled etched acrylic on plywood mounted on shipping containers, Artists Monument displays 392,486 modern and contemporary creators. Ranging from Vincent Van Gogh and Andy Warhol to emerging artists with a single exhibition to their credit, the names are alphabetically etched on the surface of vibrantly colored acrylic panels. The list of names, unbound by experience level, acclaim or global exposure, symbolically flatten the hierarchies that exist between lauded and unknown artists and instead celebrates the entire community. Artists Monument is, in part, an ironic reaction to art world’s perceived exclusivity, even that of the Whitney Biennial.

Vapourous Sculptural Act, 2014
Permanent installation at Massey University
Auckland, New Zealand

Vapourous Sculptural Act complicates our expectations of permanence and monumentality — something often ascribed to permanent public works of art. By employing vapour as a sculptural material, the work is in a state of continuous change. Vapourous Sculptural Act suggests an unsteady proximity between the edges of the work, the land, the air...perhaps the viewer’s body. Just as it is seen, it dissipates and vanishes.

Rustichella, 2014
Wexner Center for the Arts
Columbus, OH

Rustichella, a photograph of the interior of a small bag of pasta, was chosen for the installation at the Wexner Center for its proportions (aligning symmetrically with the entrance wall) and for its translucent material which matched the gallery’s wooden floor. Rustichella belongs to the Fundosseries: photographs of the interiors of empty cardboard boxes, packages, and bags, registering the light entering the space, reflecting in its walls and lending it an ambiance. Fundos photographs are often works in situ, since each copy is printed in precise dimensions to adjust to the particular room in which they are installed. Their titles refer to the original content of each container. 

Mirrorama, 2014
Wexner Center for the Arts
Columbus, OH

When Mirrorama was conceived Koch was inspired by the “dazzle ships” painted in high-contrast geometrical abstractions by the U.S. and British navies during World Wars I and II – intrigued by the idea of using dazzling effects, not to make an object disappear, but rather to instill such visual confusion that one could neither identify an object’s shape nor dimensions.

Mirrorama was installed at the entrance, stairs, lobby, and café of the Wexner Center for the Arts in the exhibition, Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil. Koch covered the building’s existing columns with mirrored acrylic sheets, enhancing the disorienting effect of their presence and location. The risers of the stairs were also covered with mirrors. The only new element built for the work was a freestanding-mirrored column installed at the lobby that visually continued the interrupted column hanging above the stairs. 

Weather Field No. 1, 2013
Tongva Park, Santa Monica, CA
49 telescoping stainless steel poles

Weather Field No. 1 is a site-specific sculpture composed of 49 telescoping stainless steel poles aligned in a highly ordered grid. Alternating at heights of 19, 20 and 21 feet, each pole supports a weather vane and anemometer. These finely tuned instruments are designed to accurately respond to prevailing wind conditions, gauging wind speed and direction. In Weather Field, the close grouping of the poles augments the instruments’ standard function. Instead of only mapping the wind in a conventional manner, the sculpture also uses crowding as a condition to trigger and reveal turbulence, a much more mysterious phenomenon. Weather Field strikes a balance between the order of the instrument grid and the unpredictable response of its kinetic elements to produce its own microclimate. In its peculiar climate the instruments influence and react to one another, flocking and schooling like birds in the air and fish in sea.  

Sited at the crest of a gentle berm of meadow grasses, Weather Field announces itself from a great distance as well as a number of vantage points in the park. The rigid verticality of the stainless steel sculpture contrasts and compliments both the flowing landscaping beneath it and the natural forces at play in its canopy. Depending on which way the viewer approaches the sculpture; the poles may align themselves as a transparent set of columns, or may reveal themselves to be a random forest of slender elements.  As such Weather Field serves to gauge the viewer’s movement and provide coordinates as they navigate the park or contemplate the weather. Weather Field is a constant reminder of our connection to both local and global conditions and might also call to mind the subtle affects we each have on one another.

Conversion, 2013
11th Sharjah Biennial
United Arab Emirates

Conversion was installed at Bait Al Hurma, a small house attached to a large empty courtyard located in Sharjah’s heritage district. Koch designed a roof structure for the courtyard made of steel beams, panels and frames filled with color correction filters, often used for lighting film sets. Each filter created a conversion of the color temperature of light, fragmenting the space into an array of colors – from a sodium vapor light to a golden sunset, from a dark, clouded shadow to a twilight-hour glow. Each panel was fixed at a different angle from the floor and ceiling, with some panels hung vertically, creating transparent obstacles to the eye and body. The gesticulation of the panels mirrored the folding and unfolding repeated during Muslim prayers in the Shia mosque located beside the house, the roof opening and articulating like a living thing.

Additional filters were also installed inside a series of small niches located in the house attached to the courtyard, filling the hallway with pockets of golden, amber and lavender light. 

Conversation, 2013
11th Sharjah Biennial
United Arab Emirates

Conversation was installed in a long corridor-like room on the first floor of Bait Al Serkal, a three-story heritage building connected to a veranda by a sequence of eight doors. The doors were removed and replaced with colored screens that could be seen from both inside and outside the room. Fashioned from a double layer of transparent colored Plexiglas, the patterns on the screens were inspired by elements of domestic architecture found in the United Arab Emirates and Brazil. The screens opened the room to air and light, creating a flow between the indoor and outdoor spaces and allowing people to see and hear each other, whether within or without. 

Materialization/De-Materialization, 2013

High-definition video. Color, sound. 04m38s, loop.

Materialization/De-Materialization slowly evolves from a random pattern of “digital ripples” gradually revealing themselves to be rings made up of formations of human silhouettes. Video samples of characters in the transporter room from the original Star Trek television series, where they are “De-materialized”, then teleported through space and “Re-materialized” at their destination, are used to create the abstract composition. Hundreds of characters are introduced as short motion loops; never fully revealed seemingly trapped in a perpetual state of transition and in a constant regenerating moment of flux.

Exhibitions

2015 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
St. Louis, Missouri

2013 Hybrid Art, Grand Manege
Moscow, Russia

2013 Times Square Alliance
New York, New York

Tomorrow’s Weather, 2012

acrylic spheres, RGB-LED’s, electric cable, DMX-controller, weather data, MDF, polyurethane coating
6 ½ x 26 x 52 ½ feet, 2 x 8 x 16 meters
Commission for Stockholm Central Station, Stockholm, 2012

Photos: Sasaki Yang

At the request of Sweden’s National Public Art Council and the rail transport industry real estate company Jernhusen, Bigert & Bergström have completed a new site-specific work of art at the Stockholm Central Station. Entitled Tomorrow’s Weather Stockholm Central Station, the piece is designed as a topographic staircase overhung by glowing molecules.

The rising structure is reminiscent of sedimentary layers, or the Arctic ice cores bored out to study climatic changes through history. The atmospheric molecules (H2O, C2, N2, etc.) change color depending on the following day’s weather forecast. The work updates three times a day with the latest weather service reports, changing its guise according to the forecast. If sunny skies are predicted, the molecules take on blue tones with splashes of yellow; if clouds and rain are approaching, the molecules reflect a variety of grey tones. At the center of the molecular cloud is a single globe that moves up and down with the temperature. On cold days it hangs low and glows blue, while a warm front makes the globe rise and turn red.

At first glance, the work is an informative instrument that travelers can ‘use’ to get an idea of tomorrow’s weather. At the same time, its form is so abstract that the viewer must interpret the shifting light of the molecules intuitively. Only by observing the work many times can one ‘learn’ to read it.

The piece also ties directly into the bustle of the station, with its ever-changing arrival and departure boards that travelers continuously monitor for changes in times and platforms. The immediate future feels controlled and comprehensible, but that can all change quickly. Both heat distortion and snowdrifts can lead to a train being canceled. The temporary, volatile nature of life can be exemplified by something as simple as a passing rain shower. One small perceptual error in a weather forecast that makes us miss our train—the trivial detail that can lead to extreme consequences. We are reminded that the station is an environment that is not truly indoors. It is in constant contact with the climate through the regular departures and arrivals of the trains through the countryside.

Rainbow, 2012

Steel and painted aluminum. 94 × 188 × 8 feet. Sony Pictures Studios, Culver City.

Images and video courtesy of Joshua White and Sony Studios.

Rising 94 feet high, Rainbow speaks to the sense of optimism and well-being associated with rainbows in general and more specifically with the rainbow as imagined in the iconic Wizard of Oz film, created in the very movie studio that is now home to Rainbow, the Sony Pictures Studios. 

Tasset’s sculpture celebrates popular culture and at the same participates in the fine art tradition, particularly the Light and Space movement that is associated with Southern California. Rainbows are pure light, prismatic wonders that appear due to fortuitous combinations of moisture and solar rays. The sculpture is steel but represents an ephemeral phenomenon.

Creation (Megaplex), 2012

High-definition 3D video, color, sound. Duration: 4 minutes, loop.

Creation (Megaplex) presents a spectacle of over 500 clips from a vast archive of iconic Hollywood and international films. Set within the form of a giant DNA double-helix, Brambilla takes the viewer on a spiraling trajectory that begins with a big bang and continues through embryonic inception, idyllic Eden-like bliss, and decadence, and culminates in annihilation—only to then interminably re-invent itself. Brambilla creates a hyper-realistic landscape of clouds, meadows, and burning cityscapes against which this cycle of human endeavor unfolds. According to Christopher Eamon, “Brambilla’s working method is unique. Not content to merely montage clips together one after the other as in the now-familiar ‘collage film’ genre where appropriated films are sequenced to create something new, Brambilla’s approach crops and isolates figures and bits of action…collaging them together across space—as in a painting—as well as in time, as the piece unfolds temporally."

Exhibitions & screenings

2015 Fondation Beyeler
Riehen, Switzerland

2013 Art Contemporani a la UB
Fundaciaó Sorigué, University of Barcelona
Barcelona, Spain

2013 SITE Santa Fe
Sante Fe, New Mexico

2013 Saint Patrick’s Basilica
New York, New York

2012 Christopher Grimes Gallery
Santa Monica, California

SCHOCKEN
Neon sign, 98 x 1200 cm
Los Angeles, CA

SCHOCKEN, part 3 refers to the department store demolished in 1960, but also to the Schocken publishing house, which brought out Franz Kafka's Amerika in 1935 and the first American edition in 1946.

Ten years after translocating the store's neon sign — which was removed by the Nazis in 1938 and whose whereabouts are still unknown — to the facade of the Hegel Museum in Stuttgart, Kellndorfer was commissioned to install SCHOCKEN in the garden of a Los Angeles villa. The letters were positioned in such a way as to be reflected in the water of the pool.

The 1930s house of the actress Anne Baxter was completely rebuilt by John Lautner in 1951. A further architectural layer was added in 2010 through renovations carried out by architectural firm Johnston Marklee.

Cloud Portico, 2014

stainless-steel mirrors, acrylic, aluminum, LED tubes
dimensions variable
Commission for a primary school in Lugnet, Stockholm, 2014

Photos: Mathias Johansson

Cloud Portico is part of a larger public commission for a primary school in Lugnet, Stockholm. For this installation, the ceiling of the school’s entrance portico has been wreathed in clouds that appear to have descended directly through the roof. These sculptural clouds form an elevated scenic backdrop, like the many-layered theatrical border curtains that hang above a stage. The sides of the clouds glow white, but their billowing, mirrored undersides reflect the visitors’ movements through the entryway. On entering the school, these clouds can be viewed as symbols of knowledge acquisition: as they expand, they widen the field we can’t see, just as the more knowledge we accumulate, the better we can observe further questions looming on the horizon.

For a long time, the cloud itself escaped all categorization; but in a seminal 1802 paper, “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds,” the American pharmacist Luke Howard proposed the major taxonomic categories for clouds, which are still in use today. This endeavor to establish precise descriptions of ever-changing atmospheric forms suggests a comic side to humanity’s search for knowledge—a zealous ambition that the cloud watcher, flat on her back on a warm summer day, might laugh out loud at.

Cloud Prototype No. 6 (Altocumulus Lenticularis), 2011
Zurich Airport, Switzerland

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's Cloud Prototype No. 6 is a sculpture made from aluminum alloy foil, fiberglass and steel. The disc-like shape of the sculpture is based on altocumulus lenticular clouds, which form when ambient airflow is disrupted by mountains. Suspended in the Zurich Airport, the sculpture is representative of weather patterns indicative of the region. 

Solar Passage, 2011

DMX-controlled LEDs, steel, acrylic, heating system
Dimensions variable Commissioned for Familjebostäder, Stockholm, 2011

Photo: Michael Perlmutter

Solar Passage consists of five glowing “solar discs” and an artificially heated bathing rock installed in front of Kvarteret Torken, an apartment complex built in 2011. The five luminous discs, reflecting a rainbow of colors, identify the sun’s position at each hour of the day. Linked to a computer with 365 daily lighting scenarios, the discs are a modern sundial on which the viewer can intuitively read both the time of day and the season. The discs glow yellow at noon, with just a hint of blue horizon at the edges of the outermost circles. At night they pulsate a deep midnight blue.

The sunbathing rock provides a touch of the natural surroundings that were altered when the building was erected. The main entrance, with steps up to the courtyard, appears to have been built around the rock, where visitors can sit down and watch traffic in the roundabout. While sitting on the rock, visitors can feel a simulation of the residual warmth of the sun after a long summer day. This is even more noticeable in the colder, darker parts of the year when the rock continues to provide a warming break for passers-by.

The concept behind Solar Passage was to try to restore a bit of the natural world in the built environment. The sun rarely finds its way to the north side of city buildings, where the entrance is located; normally you can only guess where the sun may be.

Evolution (Megaplex), 2010

High-definition 3D video. Color, sound, 3m 4s minute loop.

Evolution (Megaplex), illustrates the history of mankind, from the pre-historic to contemporary and into the future through the use of sampled film imagery depicting the origin, evolution, and eventual civilization of Man. The work expands upon the use of the video mural technique Brambilla developed for Civilization (Megaplex), using approximately 400 individual film samples which are blended into a fluid, interconnected tableau.

The source material is primarily genre films where historic milestones are interpreted as spectacle; the theatricality of the images presents us with a satirical take on the origin and destiny of man as told through the lexicon of the "Hollywood" epic. Inspired by the murals and dioramas found in natural history museums, this cinematic tapestry retells human evolution and history in a loosely chronological horizontally scrolling canvas. Characters from all periods of film are set within the vast panorama in an apocalyptic spectacle of constantly unfolding human conflict.

Exhibitions & screenings

2015 Fondation Beyeler
Riehen, Switzerland

2013 ‘The Idyllic Synthesis: Contradictions of Vision and Reality
Seoul Museum of Art
Seoul, Korea

2012 ‘Evolution (Megaplex)’, Inaugural Exhibition
Broad Art Museum
East Lansing, Michigan

2012 ‘Sunlight on Cold Water’
Kunsthalle
Detroit, Michigan

2012 A trip to the moon: Before and after film
Bonniers Konsthall
Stockholm, Sweden

2012 Urban Arena #2
Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (MACRO)
Rome, Italy

2012 New Frontier, Sundance Film Festival
Utah Museum of Contemporary Art
Salt Lake City, Utah

2011 68th Venice International Film Festival
Venice, Italy

2011 ‘The Dark Lining’
Santa Monica Museum of Art
Santa Monica, California

Le regard extérieur, 2010
Family Ministry Building
Berlin, Germany

The structure and function of the Family Ministry building itself were the starting points for this work. The orthogonally structured glass façade of the building is traversed by three diagonal stairways. The gradient angle and height of the stair configurations – their steps revealing a sawtooth appearance from below – are taken up 1:1 and concentrated into a honeycomb structure of ascending and descending stairs and railings. A new form of transparency emerges through the superimposition of image space and real space. The difference between the sensation of interior and exterior is manifested on the surface of the glass façade. The image of a tree’s bright green leaves intrude in front of this architectural grid on the right-hand edge of the image.

Le regard intérieur, 2010
Family Ministry Building
Berlin, Germany

The stairway in the entrance hall that leads directly along the exterior façade is surrounded by glass walls, as if it were integrated into a display case. The huge negative space - the underside of the real stairway – can be seen through the clear glass façade on the front side. Kellndorfer  printed the stair motif - taken from the Bachstelzenweg 4 reconstruction program – on the wall which divides the stairs form the entrance hall. This segment of stairway is represented as a photographic inversion, as a negative, almost opaque, and printed at the scale of the actual staircase. A rubber plant – that classic of the petit-bourgeois interior – can be seen in front of the stairs. Kellndorfer photographed it in her studio several years before. In its considerable enlargement, which make the veins of the leaves stand out like branches, it is a reference to the painting by René Magritte from 1942 from which this work derives its title.

One Hundred Foot Line, 2009

Stainless steel
100-foot height x 3-foot diameter
National Gallery of Canada in Ottowa, Canada
Images courtesy of the artist

One Hundred Foot Line was created as a permanent public sculpture located on Nepean Point, a hill in downtown Ottawa east of the National Gallery of Canada. Overlooking the Ottawa River, the stainless-steel sculpture references the capital city’s proximity to nature and its industrial context within the region.

One Hundred Foot Line is part of Roxy Paine’s series titled Dendroids which has earned him significant international acclaim in recent years. Made from unyielding, stainless steel pipes used in manufacturing and heavy industry, One Hundred Foot Line is a masterful example of Paine's intense fascination with trees and his technical ability to create sublime structures from industrial materials. For him, the Dendroids represent an attempt to observe trees as a language governed by rules and structures and reflect his thoughts on human encroachment on the environment.

One Hundred Foot Line presents a meandering tree trunk that has lost not only its leaves but all of its branches. The tallest of Paine's Dendroids to date, the work welds together dozens of stainless steel cylinders into a seamless whole. The National Gallery's sculpture distinguishes itself from others in this series through its uniform shimmer which displays a calmly discerning monumentality. As a glossy line extending steadfastly upward, Paine's offering is a bold statement on the relationship between nature and the "man-made" in our contemporary world.

An example of Paine’s interest in natural forms and in creating sinuous structures from industrial materials. Though its form resembles a bare tree trunk, the sculpture is made from pipes that are commonly used in manufacturing and heavy industry.

Maelstrom, 2009

Stainless steel 22 x 140 x 50 feet
Commissioned for exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Iris B. and Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, New York, NY
Images courtesy of the artist

Maelstrom was originally commissioned for an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Iris B. and Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, New York, NY in 2009. In overview, Maelstrom can be seen as a mental storm characterized by a tangle of synaptic connections or a hyperactive mutated robotic vascular system. Maelstrom was imagined as a piece existing in five states simultaneously. First, as a forest downed by a tremendous turbulent force. Second, as that force itself. Third, as a neural “storm” such as might occur in the brain during an epileptic seizure. Fourth, as a vascular system connecting to the building’s own vascular system, and fifth, the tree in the process of becoming abstract - broken down and reconstituted.

Roxy Paine’s interest in stainless steel derives from its institutionalized use in pharmaceutical, food, gas, and oil pipeline industries. Paine’s Dendroids decompose and dissolve standard stainless steel pipe into a language of parts. To Paine, this distillation becomes a knowledge of the physics and dynamics of the steel, as well as, a disseminated language of tools. His Dendroids reprogram and/or rewrite industrial materials from utilitarian to transcendent. Through his reprocessing of standard industrial materials, Paine transcribes stainless steel into a psychoactive or hallucinatory experience. The banal and the hallucinatory are often a conceptually intertwined and indecipherable component of Paine’s work.

Conjoined, 2009

Stainless steel 40 x 45 x 33 feet
Museum of Modern Art at Fort Worth, Texas
Images courtesy of the artist

Conjoined was first commissioned and exhibited at Madison Square Park, New York, from 2007 to 2008. The falseness or illogical growth of these dendritic structures form a kind of hallucinatory or unreal experience. Conjoined also represents a venturing from the earlier work, characterized by an emphasis on restraint, into the additional possibilities of rhizomatic structures and ideas. As in all the Dendroids, heavy gauge utilitarian industrial pipes are physically altered by means of tremendous hydraulic and mechanical pressure to contradict their original function and physical anonymity. Conjoined was acquired by the Modern Art Museum of Ft Worth designed by architect Tadao Ando.

Tomorrow’s Weather

RGB-LED lights, acrylic molecules, weather computer, DMX controller
115 x 66 x 15 feet, 35 x 20 x 15 meters
Aller Media Headquarters, Copenhagen, 2009

Photos: Anders Sune Berg

The light installation Tomorrow’s Weather commissioned by Aller Media for their corporate headquarters in Copenhagen, consists of 125 atmospheric molecules, H2O, CO2, N2, O3, etc., lighting up the headquarters of the Danish publishing house, Aller Media. The double helix-shaped cluster reaches 35 m up in the air and is connected to the Danish weather forecast bureau. As the weather forecast changes the light scenarios of the molecules change and gives the viewer an intuitive experience of what the weather will look like tomorrow. In the center of the work is a single globe placed which travels up or down depending on the temperature.

Propagation of Electric Current, 2009
MIMOCA, Kagawa, Japan
223 fluorescent lamps

In this large-scale installation, the bulbs of the fluorescent lamps turn on successively with an audible pinging sound. After an interval of turning on and off in seemingly random order, the bulbs all go dark with a sudden and surprising pop. This cycle repeats itself, lending the installation a sense of silent musicality and rhythm. The white light of the bulbs was developed with the aim of reproducing the white light of the afternoon sun as visible by the human eye.

Unfocused World, 2009
40-channel video installation on monitors
MIMOCA, Kagawa, Japan

Unfocused World is an installation comprising 40 cathode-ray tube TVs. Each of the televisions changes color according to its own particular pattern and emits the sound of a test signal. Composed in seemingly random order, the televisions cohesively achieve a sense of harmony.

Neuron, 2009

stainless steel
41 x 48 x 52 feet
Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Images courtesy of Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park and William J Hebert

Neuron, part of Paine’s Dendroid series, is an abstract, re-imagined tree, hand-constructed from approximately 3,500 stainless steel rods and cylindrical industrial piping commonly used in pharmaceutical and nuclear power plants.

Paine’s juxtaposition of nature and industry is central to his acclaim as one of the most important sculptors of his generation.

Among the twenty globally sited Dendroid siblings, Neuron is unique. While most of the others more closely resemble trees, this one is the least literal and the most visually complex.

“I strive for imagery that is between things – nature and industry, science and art, but not quite comfortable in either world.” -Roxy Paine.

polyrhythm, 2009
Kulturheis des deutschen Wirtschaft
Berlin, Germany
55 colored neon tubes

In polyrhythm, colored tubes are arranged on two opposing walls perpendicular to a large window. The tubes, which were specially produced for the installation in eighteen different colors, pulsate with colorful light in a "color melody" orchestrated by the artist. The light shines through the window of the space, altering the viewer’s experience of space from both the interior and exterior.

UNE, 2008
Weathering Steel 105 x 197 x 103 in
New York High Line, 2008

Photo: Tim Willis, Lockbox Productions

UNE is the first work of the Protoist Series: the culmination of Corday’s work replacing paint with heat. UNE is hewn from 3 tons of raw weathering steel, standing nearly 9 feet tall with a 13-inch thick arc spanning more than 16 feet. A 2.5-foot torch-cut void runs through the center of the arc; its resulting passage replaces the artist’s hand, or the stroke, in an otherwise mechanical process. Touch indexically registers memory on the material surface as rust–an intimate yet shared public surface.

For Corday, art is a cultural infrastructure—a particular material signature inseperable within culture—founding culture. Many of her works intervene, temporarily or permanently install within other industrial or architectural structures.

UNE began its tour with a debut exhibition in Chelsea under the High Line, curated and organized by Beverly Allan, with special thanks to Eric Touchaleaume of Galerie 54, Paris; exhibition support by Trevor Strahleski, Cardinal Investments; and Christopher Powers, KC Fabrications, New York.

Eucalyptus Trees, Sky, and Even More Plants, 2008
Justizzentrum Federal Court Building
Aachen, Germany

The installation comprises two glass towers installed in the interior of the Justizzentrum (Center for Justice) in Aachen, set into the dominant oak-grid structure. These towers encase the rear stairways in a U-form and extend from the large hall to the fourth floor: an illusive reflective wall in contrast to the surrounding architecture. Although the work adheres to the proportions of the building and is oriented to the height of the hall, it also “blows up” the spatial relationships by dramatically enlarging the underlying motif – a photograph of the façade window of the Eames House in Los Angeles. The image as a whole remains concealed from view, continually reappearing in altered form through the floor divisions or interrupted and fragmented by the inner façade.

Civilization (Megaplex), 2008

3D HD video, color, sound, 3 minute, loop.

Civilization (Megaplex) depicts a metaphysical journey from hell to heaven as represented by computer-altered found footage sampled from both mainstream and obscure films. The journey begins under Kurosawa's "Dreams" volcano, then rises through a purgatory populated by images of suburbia, demolition derbies and shopping malls. The film then soars towards a paradise of beauty contestants, cherubs, and bodybuilders, past the peaks of Mount Olympus to a cosmic portal inspired by Gustav Dore's paintings as reinterpreted in the movie, "The Fountain”. Civilization (Megaplex) is an epic video mural containing over 300 individual channels of looped video blended into a multi-layered seamless tableau of interconnected images that illustrate a contemporary and often satirical take on the concepts of Heaven and Hell.

Exhibitions & screenings

2022 Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille
Lille, France

2015 Moving Image Itineraries: From LOOP to SCREEN
Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden

2012 Nuit Blanche
Toronto City Hall Rotunda, Toronto, Canada

2008 The Standard Hotel (permanent installation)
New York, New York

2008 Living the Dream
Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, California

Inversion, 2008

Stainless steel, 42 x 45 x 33 feet
Public Art Projects for Art Basel 39, Basel, Switzerland
Images courtesy of the artist

Inversion was originally created for the Public Art Projects for Art Basel 39, Basel, Switzerland 2008, and then exhibited at Den Haag Sculptuur 2008, The Hague. Inversion is the first of the Dendroids exploring reverse structural and natural growth patterns as both an engineering and a conceptual challenge. The entire weight of the massive stainless steel sculpture rests on the smallest of its branches. It can be read as being emblematic of, and a monument to, humanity’s incessant desire to alter the natural world. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem acquired Inversion in 2011 where it is permanently installed in the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden.

Lightbulb (open), Lightbulb (closed), 2007
OK Center for Contemporary Arts
Linz, Austria

In Art in 50 Shop Windows, the city center of Linz was transformed into a mile of living art. Over 30 national and international artists exhibited their work on building facades, transforming the experience of the space and inviting a dialogue between the topics of art, advertisement and consumerism. 

Blue Berg (r11i01), 2007
Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH
suspended anodized aluminum,
rapid-prototyped ABS, USB drive

Blue Berg (r11i01) evolved from a body of work based on actual scientific data of an existing iceberg drifting in the Labrador Sea. The 460-foot iceberg, # r11i01, was scanned by the Canadian Hydraulic Center using radar and sonar. Using data provided by the scientist, the artist then went on to spend more than a year working with Chicago architect Colin Franzen to create a smaller version of Cleveland Clinic’s sculpture that “floated” in a stairwell at The Art Institute of Chicago.

“What I want to represent,” the artist declares, “is how the world represents itself to us.” Blue Berg (r11i01) explores the allegorical and other symbolic aspects of natural phenomenon--the unknown below the surface, the irrepressible and evolving force of nature, a structure non-observant of political borders or boundaries, and the proverbial “tip of the iceberg.”

Untitled (neon) and Untitled (birds), 2005
Installation view, Berlin/Tokyo, Tokyo/Berlin
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany, 2006

Koganezawa’s silent video work Untitled (neon) is installed on three screens visible from the exterior of Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Neue Nationalgalerie, while Untitled (birds) is exhibited across nine screens in the interior.

Part of the exhibition Berlin-Tokyo/Tokyo-Berlin. The Art of Two Cities, the installation was commissioned for the upper hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie, which featured a collection of artistic interventions referring to the context of urban space.

Untitled, 2006
Swiss Re Academy
Zurich, Switzerland

A very long 110 x 2.4 metre blue painted line runs down the length of the exterior of the Swiss Re Academy building. A colour wrap of the building’s skeleton? An optic strip to tease the eye? Mosset has said that he's interested in colours "in shapes and in surfaces," and here he brings together both. It may sound simplistic but in the context of Mosset’s work, this is a matter of reducing his palette to the purest form.

Mosset’s painting has been variously described as "conceptual" and "minimal" but he has said succinctly: "I’m sure some people will not notice that it's art. The challenge is not to do something that is design or decoration. It has to keep this status of art or painting."

This semi-public piece contrasts with the more intimate surroundings of his other commissions placed within the offices. For the former, the painting is experienced as part of how we look at the building and, for the latter, we are bound to be more aware of our own bodies in front of the work.

Sketch I, 2006
Swiss Re Academy
Zurich, Switzerland

For Sketch I, Mosset painted four yellow and three brown panels, each nine metres high – the biggest paintings he had produced up to the that point. How did he choose the colour? "This is a nice way to ask something. The colour might have chosen me…," Mosset has said, somewhat enigmatically. The possibilities of painting have been at the heart of his work. As he puts it: "I have problems with painting and I have problems painting them, and it's the fact that I am not happy that makes me go on…."

For this commission, though, Mosset was mindful before he started about who it was for: "The situation here is a bit special because it's a public situation, which means that some people who are not interested in seeing artwork, have to look at it, or pass by it; so you have a responsibility that you don’t have in a museum."

La Tormenta / The Storm, 2006
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration District Headquarters, Chicago, IL

To create La Tormenta/The Storm and a series of works based on clouds, Manglano-Ovalle teamed with the Department of Atmospheric Sciences (DAS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and architect Douglas Garofalo. In 2002, a powerful storm system entered Illinois from Missouri. Using laser and digital technologies, climatologists at DAS tracked the storm as it spread over eighteen miles in length and produced strong atmospheric effects. Their study monitored the system’s fluctuating composition as it responded to internal and external forces over a period of minutes. DAS shared the data with Manglano- Ovalle, who then worked with Garofalo to translate it as a virtual form based on the contours of the storm’s core moments before it erupted. The evocative shapes that resulted were entered into a computer-controlled milling machine that carved molds to create casts for the final piece. When completed, the sculpture consisted of two nearly identical forms composed of cast fiberglass that were assembled and then covered by hand with titanium-alloy foil.

In La Tormenta/The Storm, Manglano-Ovalle has condensed a moment of time and atmospheric space into solid objects. Suspended from the building’s atrium skylight, the sculptures’ shimmering surfaces reflect the shifting qualities of light and air throughout each day. For Manglano-Ovalle, La Tormenta/The Storm is a complex metaphor for the historical waves of immigration into the united States: “All of those waves come with a great deal of hope and a great deal of anxiety. And that’s what a thunderstorm is—it’s one of the most destructive and most productive events. It wreaks havoc, and yet it makes it possible for us to eat and grow food. The piece in a sense reflects its public—they are the storm. La tormenta somos nosotros [we are the storm].”

The Fast Mirror, 2005
5th Mercosul Biennial
Porto Alegre, Brazil

The Fast Mirror is composed of a granite platform that supports steel pipes and four granite boulders. Istalled on the banks of the Guaíba River, the installation is integrated into the environment and creates a dialog with the river; the bodies of spectators moving around the sculpture mirroring the undulations of the river. The work was commissioned for the 5th Mercosul Biennial and was subsequently donated to the city of Porto Alegre for its permanent public art collection.

Iceberg r11i01, 2005
The Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, IL

Iceberg r11i01 is based on scientific data of an existing iceberg drifting in the Labrador Sea. The 460-foot iceberg, # r11i01, was scanned by the Canadian Hydraulic Center using radar and sonar. Using this data provided by the scientists, Manglano-Ovalle collaborated with Chicago architect Colin Franzen to create the 25-foot sculpture that floated inside the spiral staircase The Art Institute of Chicago.

Moved Viewers, 1999
S-Bahnhof Bornholmer Straße
Berlin, Germany

In Kellndorfer’s Moved Viewers installation, the wall facing the platform stairs of the Berlin Bornholmer Straße train station supports five glass panels, which are silkscreened with the image of a 1950’s Berlin tenement building staircase. The panels comprise an enormous wall of glass, with the screenprinted staircase  reflecting the actual staircase of the train station.

Belle Vue, 1997
S-Bahnhof Bellevue
Berlin, Germany

In Belle Vue, Kellndorfer installed seven glass panels onto seven formerly bricked-up windows of the Berlin Bellevue Train Station. The panels were silkscreened with images of drapes and installed behind a lattice window motif. 

Omkring (Around), 1994
Leirfjord, Norway

The starting-point for Waltercio Caldas' sculpture Around was the distance he observed between the houses in Leirfjord. This distance seemed to mark the perfect spacing for maintaining privacy, while also offering a possibility for social contact. In his sculpture, the artist juxtaposes the dimensions of this in-between space with those of the surrounding landscape.

The construction of the sculpture also marks and organises the space around it. Its metal lines can be seen as a three-dimensional drawing against the background of the natural landscape. The sculpture rests lightly on the ground, and seems to be more on a visit than permanently set in the landscape.

The unique element in the viewer's experience of the sculpture is defined by his/her own presence and physical position in relation to it. The sculpture invites us to pay attention to seeing, to enter into an alert state of observation, while also keeping in mind the traditions of sculptural expression.