Josiah McElheny, Bruno Taut's Monument to Socialist Spirituality (after Mies van der Rohe), 2009. Birch plywood and glass. H 8 ft.
Former Lino Tagliapietra apprentice and current art world intellectual Josiah McElheny will unveil his latest explorations of modernism through a mash-up of the contrasting styles of two architects who took opposite approaches to glass building design in Weimar Germany. For his latest exhibit at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City, opening on Saturday, September 12, McElheny rebuilds Mies van der Rohe’s 1922 breakthrough model of a glass skyscraper with the decidedly un-Miesian addition of primary colors as a way of channeling the more chromatically and politically liberal spirit of a fellow German architect Bruno Taut.
Titled Bruno Taut’s Monument to Socialist Spirituality (after Mies van der Rohe), the work is an oversized model that stands 8-feet tall and is made of birch ply studded with blocks of colored glass. While Mies imposed a rigid structural aesthetic to his work and designed buildings devoid of color, Taut’s buildings were known (and criticized) for incorporating a wide chromatic palette (Taut was an accomplished painter) as well as offering too much light and air for the “simple people” that would inhabit the housing projects he designed in a period of increasing tension between left- and right-leaning ideologies.
This work will be the centerpiece of the exhibit, titled “Proposals for a Chromatic Modernism,” which will also include wall-mounted sculptures, colored-over historic black-and-white photographs, and framed white-on-white prints of silhouetted period glassware. The latter’s “perceptual instability,” as the exhibition announcement puts it, “echoes McElheny’s belief in the dual nature of modernity: its alluring ‘perfection’ and its terrifying obliteration of difference.”
Josiah McElheny “Proposals for a Chromatic Modernism” September 12 – October 17, 2009 Andrea Rosen Gallery 525 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011
