Architecture as Metaphor

A mix of sculpture, tapestry, film, photography, painting and collage by 33

artists whose work refers to, or manipulates, the built environment, this
exhibition heightens awareness of one’s own physical presence and the
intensity – and complexity - of our relationship to the material and spatial
world around us

Griffin Gallery, London

9 March – 21 April 2017
by VERONICA SIMPSON
An impressive cast-list has been assembled for this group exhibition of
artists from the UK, Germany and Holland - among them Richard
Wentworth, Phyllida Barlow, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Deacon, Tony
Carter and Michael Craig-Martin - curated by the Griffin Gallery’s Becca
Pelly-Fry and sculptor Steve Johnson. But it is the discoveries among the 33
artists here that bring, to my mind, the revelations, in their careful
interrogation not of grandiose architectural themes but the telling details of
our everyday encounters with landscapes great and small.
And for that, we have to thank Johnson, whose own work is, as Pelly-Fry
puts it, a celebration of “the poetry of the every day”. The initial inspiration
came from a lecture Johnson gave in 2012, called Architecture as Metaphor,
which explored “how art since the medieval period has represented or
manipulated the built environment”. His selected illustrations were: Stefano
di Giovanni’s The Ecstasy of St Francis (1437-44), Vermeer’s Girl Asleep at a
Table (1657), Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942), Walter de Maria’s Earth

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Room (1968), and Whiteread’s Ghost (1990). He says: “The lecture was a
way of using a subject to compare and contrast and imply a kinship between
artists long dead and working now … a bridge in time.” In the course of this
lecture, he was struck by the role that spatial or architectural detail plays in
intensifying these connections: for example, the way Vermeer captures the
gleam of daylight as it glances off the paintwork on a doorway beside the
girl’s sleeping form.
The day after the opening, I was given a guided tour of the exhibition by
Johnson, along with several of the artists based in Germany and Holland,
and their shared sensibility and skill in interrogating the under-the-radar,
everyday environments as source material for psychological enrichment
soon became apparent.
Susanne Rosin’s stop-motion animation Einkaufspassagen im Erfurter
Hauptbahnhof, am Donnerstag um 16:20, Vorfrühling (2016) is a
masterpiece of observation. She also works as a set-designer, creating
fantasy landscapes for film and theatre, which might explain her intense
attachment to the opposite sort of space: the most mundane areas of shared
transit and non-dwelling that are vital to, but completely uncelebrated in,
our lives, such as doctors’ waiting rooms, ordinary high streets, airport
lobbies, suburban shopping malls and public toilets. These she
painstakingly recreates using digital photographs to conjure hyper-real
versions of flooring, walls and ceilings, but she underscores their fake-ness
by creating soundtracks with the cheapest kind of muzak she can find
online, along with recordings of the appropriate ambient sound: chatter and
hum, traffic and sirens. Instead of filling these scenes with pretend people,
she uses shopping bags or luggage trolleys, which trundle and ponder as
they move through these spaces, representing all the necessary diversity by
the style and branding of each carefully reproduced bag or luggage trolley.
She says: “I describe the situations using cheap materials and I make it very
cheaply. I want it to struggle. For me, it’s really important you realise how
it’s done.” Rather than seeming drab, these films are endearing, funny,
poignant and acutely observed – there is a delicious perversity to seeing
familiar but unlovely places celebrated in this way.
Johnson’s piece here also brings the shock of the familiar, with great
craftsmanship and eye for detail, but the intention is more to jar and
unsettle. Johnson casts scaled-down elements of everyday spaces in bronze,
paints them in thick, grey enamel paint, then places them on a wall in such a
way as to intensify the disjunction between scale and setting. In Academic
Angst (2017), we have a bog-standard modern wall-hung radiator, complete
with pipes, a bookshelf, a doorway, a light switch, a skirting board and a
power socket. But the Anglepoise lamp attached to the power socket is
hanging free, dangling below the skirting board, to draw attention to the
missing floor; the lamp is a graphic depiction of gravity. Johnson says: “This
is a psychological metaphor for being exposed … to the things which a home
would normally provide as security.” He thinks it a timely evocation of
modern Britain, which is “suffering a Conservative austerity, with thousands

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of people living on the street. In spite of being quite meticulous and
beautiful, it’s really about how the security of the home has been removed.”
Political undercurrents are certainly present in this show: Stephen Robson’s
elemental painting Port (2013), of an intense, almost Mediterranean, blue
sea surrounding Dover harbour, may well be making a humanitarian point,
with the meanness of the harbour entrance offering faint welcome to any
migrants. But it is a current of kinetic intensity that dominates as we move
from the pulsating energy fields of one of Dieter Roth’s iconic 6 Piccadillies
(1969-70) screenprints to the liquid meditations of Evy Jokhova’s Puddle
(2011). A film of a tower block reflected in a puddle as wind distorts and
remakes it, the piece is itself reflected in a tray of water placed at the
screen’s base. At the show’s core, we encounter the coiled elegance of Owen
Bullett’s sculpture Raft (2017; created for this show) which he describes
thus: “A solitary survival platform, cast adrift on a concrete sea: elemental
vessel, transient craft, floating planks, dead sea.” Its uneasy equilibrium
works well sandwiched between Carter’s Point of Balance (1983-86), a
spirit-level on top of slices of Sicilian marble and MDF, and Barlow’s
toppling tower of scorched-looking boxes, Untitled, Stackboxtube (2015),
seemingly pinned in place by the force of an oversized, bent pink baton. It is
good to see three of Carter’s pieces here – he was clearly a supporter of
Johnson’s ideas for this exhibition, and wrote the introduction to the
catalogue before his death at the end of last year; an event that makes the
presence of his sculptural evocation of medieval vanitas paintings,
Intimations of Mortality (2015-16), even more profound.
There is a mood of disequilibrium or fragility all around this central
grouping, expressed in Maurizio Anzeri’s Heavenly Sounds Pink & Yellow
(2016) - an ethereal, airborne structure, like a vast windbreak, hand-
stitched on to a black-and-white photograph of a bleak and empty beach –
and also in Martin Pfahler’s precisely crinkled geometric paper sculpture,
Imprint (2016), a flimsy tower of fine tissue on the point of collapse. Pfahler
reveals that he has to be physically present to install this piece every time it
is shown, as it crumples when transported. “Is it a self-portrait?” Johnson
asks. No, says Pfahler. But its requirement for Pfahler’s physical presence
means, as Johnson points out to him: ‘When you die, this work will no
longer exist.” Now there’s architecture as metaphor.
On the adjacent wall, there are works that explore landscapes with darker
narratives, of survival or the deeper subconscious. Miyuki Okuyama’s Circus
Tent (2006-11), from her Safe Playground Series, shows a simple paper tent,
lit from within – revealing the shadow of a donkey – and surrounded by
fairy lights. In this series, she creates miniature landscapes, usually the
“common places”, she says, “like grain elevators and hospital buildings”,
and conjures eerie atmospheres from small details, night-time settings and
lighting. She says she is trying to evoke remembered fairytales from her
youth in Japan, which embraced and accepted the “dark side” of the child’s
psyche, in a way that seems altogether absent to her in Holland, where she
now lives. Her scenes are photographed using analogue film and processes,

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then expanded. “I like that this is a very small model, blown up to a metre,”
she says. “It is almost physical - you could go into it.”
Nearby are two of Dutch artist Rob Voerman’s photographic
representations, also of surreal models in landscapes, although his locations
appear to have suffered some apocalyptic disaster. Voerman’s models often
reference modernist mass housing - in Unité (2014), the building is based
on Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille – and he takes great pains
to emphasise the buildings’ scorched and devastated fabric and
surroundings. Yet the background sky he uses is always from photos he
takes in the countryside, at sunset. This gives these crushed cardboard
communities something of a euphoric – or “romantic”, as he says –
atmosphere, further enhanced by the warm amber or coloured lights that
appear to be burning in the windows. They speak of survival, as well as
destruction.
Order and chaos are also variously evoked in a nearby wall grouping, which
sees Michael Craig-Martin’s generic (yet somehow intensely specific)
wooden Gateprint (2015), placed to the right of Whiteread’s Herringbone
Floor (2001), whose crooked parquet lines indicate some major seismic
activity, while to its left is Fabian Peake’s creepy, childlike pen and ink
drawing of a house seemingly imploding (Ferment, 2004). Nearby are two
of Ulrich Jansen’s paintings, elegies to everyday oddness, including a
meticulous, black-and-white portrait of a humble, typical former East
German holiday cottage (Schulstrasse, 1998); utterly banal in all its details,
including the satellite dish, it is elevated by dint of its transformation on to
canvas via oils.
On the near wall sit two of Berlin-based Wolfgang Schlegel’s latest series of
sculptures involving pieces of driftwood adorned with magnets and balls,
held together only by magnetic force. Referencing their lack of adhesive
support as well as their resemblance to the science fiction cities he loved to
create as a kid, he calls them Life on Noglu (2017). High above these two
works is a Richard Wentworth piece, called Seen Unseens (2017). An
ornithological ready-made, it is a real bird’s nest – empty, but with a mirror
over it so you can see it for yourself.
There is little in the way of overt architectural symbolism, except on the far
wall, with Arturo Di Stefano’s huge oil painting, Florentine Window (2015),
which renders the rainbow-hued light of each glass pane in exquisite detail
and conjures the dank smell and tolling bell of the vast cathedral that
probably inspired it. Next to it is its sulphurous twin: Peter Newell Price’s
Carbon Eclipse (2017), a cast of an actual gothic rose window, rendered
blasted and lightless in carbon fibre and epoxy resin.
Deacon’s contribution here is actually an anomaly: it is the only work
destined to become a structure. Designed in conjunction with Serbian artist
Mrdjan Bajic, this elliptical, calligraphic swirl has now been commissioned
for Belgrade’s Kalemegdan Park, in the hope that it can unite two formerly
antagonistic neighbourhoods and become a bridge between communities –
infrastructure as metaphor. Pelly-Fry says: “It’s an important work on a

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number of levels. It exists as an idea and it’s one that potentially will have a
great impact on how the local community interacts with the space and with
each other. The idea that a sculptor is working in this way with an artist … is
really interesting: addressing social issues through a sculpture.”
One of the most striking aspects of this show, given its subject matter, is the
almost complete absence of people in any of the works, a deliberate ploy,
says Johnson: “If there aren’t figures in a picture, you’re more than likely
going to project yourself into it and inhabit the space with curiosity. [The
philosopher] Gaston Bachelard observed that a closed drawer is more
captivating than an open drawer. Once opened, the mystery escapes. The
closed drawer will be a catalyst for the mind’s eye. The same holds good for
a painting or a photograph of a closed door, for example. You can’t ever
open the door, so you’ll tend to imagine what’s on the other side.
“The exhibition is really about how an artwork referring to the built
environment can be inhabited by subjectivities and (enable you) to find
shelter from the mundane.”

Click on the pictures below to enlarge

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Phyllida Barlow. Untitled: stackboxtube2015, 2015, Cardboard, plywood, scrim, cement,
plaster, tape, paint, spray paint, PVA, 174 x 80 x 105 cm. Photograph: Alex Delfanne.
Courtesy of the Artist and Hauser & Wirth

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Arturo Di Stefano. Florentine Window, 2015, Oil on linen, 182.9 x 167.6 cm. Courtesy of
Purdy Hicks Gallery.

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Dieter Roth. 6 Piccadillies, 1969–1970. Screen print, 50 x 70 cm. Private collection.

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Fabian Peake. Ferment, 2004. Pen and ink, 56 x 76 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Gary Stevens. Containment, 2012. Video installation (detail), dimensions variable. Courtesy
of the artist.

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Jemima Burrill. Cleaner, 2004. Video, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Galerie Houg.

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Lucy Gunning. Intermediate II, 2001. Digital video shot on mini DV, 22 mins approx,
dimensions variable. Lucy Gunning © the artist and Matt's Gallery.

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Maurizio Anzeri. Heavenly sounds, 2016. Embroidery on photograph, 85 x 120 cm. Courtesy
of the artist.

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Michael Craig-Martin. Gate, 2015. Letterpress editioned print, 48.2 x 48.2 cm. Courtesy of
Michael Craig-Martin and Alan Cristea Gallery.

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Miyuki Okuyama. Circus Tent, 2006/2011. Gelatin silver print on fibre-based paper mounted
on aluminium, framed with museum glass, 100 x 100cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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Rachel Whiteread. Herringbone Floor, 2001. Laser-cut relief in 0.8mm Finnish birch, 51 x 44
cm. Private collection.

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Steve Johnson. Academic Angst, 2017. Wood, brass, enamel paint, dimensions variable.
Courtesy of the artist.

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Richard Wentworth. The Loops, 1999. Book, assorted plastics and metals on glass, 70 x 25
cm. Copyright Richard Wentworth, Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

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Stephen Robson. Port, 2013. Oil on canvas, 50 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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Susanne Rosin. Einkaufspassagen im Erfurter Hauptbahnhof, am Donnerstag um 16:20,
Vorfrühling, 2016. Stop-motion film, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

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Ulrich Jansen. Schulstraße, 1998. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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Evy Jokhova. Puddle, 2011. HD film, 11 min loop, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the
artist.

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Martin Pfahler. IMPRINT, 2016. Paper, adhesive tape, 116 x 45 x 45 cm. Courtesy of the
artist.

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Rob Voerman. Unité, 2014. Archival inkjet-print mounted on aluminium, 35 x 53 cm.
Courtesy Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam.

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• Link
• Griffin Gallery, London

• Studio links
• Rachel Whiteread Retrospective
• Folkestone Triennial 2017
• 31 Women
• Tate Modern Switch House
• Comix Creatrix: 100 women making comics
• Amelia Critchlow & Evy Jokhova: ‘The conversation, in many
ways, will probably continue perpetually’
• Phyllida Barlow: Set
• Making It: Sculpture in Britain 1977-1986
• Selective Memories
• What Marcel Duchamp Taught Me

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