Glass, epoxidharz, silicon, lacquered MDF
83 x 47 x 32 cm (sculpture)
139 x 40 x 30 cm (plinth)

Isa Genzken’s series New Buildings for Berlin, which she began in 2002, envisions the quickly changing nature of the city she calls home. In these architecturally inspired works of neo-assemblage, she proposes a lightweight cityscape where colored glass takes the place of the currently existing gray infrastructures that seem to pervade Berlin. Irreverent, dissident, punk, lighthearted, and cheerful, these architectural models suggest a building tradition made of colorful, found, and reused materials that defy the “junk-burden globalized world.” They consist of ensembles of rearticulated ready mades that are daring yet simple, sustainable and aspirational at once. Strips of colored glass, painted MDF, and lacquered panes lean on one another, a reference to the modernist architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Bruno Taut, while moving beyond a pure illustrative function. In this series, the model becomes a motif, not so much a tool of representation but as a proposal for an architecture that does not yet exist.
 
New Buildings for Berlin VI is presented on a tall pedestal, which extends its towering volumes, evoking the metropolis without referring to any real building in the German capital. Instead, it alludes to a utopian imagination for an alternative social constellation, conveyed through architecture. The sculpture then becomes a space for investigating both the speculative and political function of architecture, and ultimately, of art.

PAST LOANS

Group exhibition: Abundant Futures
Venue: C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba  
Curator: Daniela Zyman
Exhibition 1 April 2022 - 5 March 2023

Vanessa Joan Müller, "Antagonism as Form," in Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary: The Commissions Book,, eds. Eva Ebersberger and Daniela Zyman (2020: Sternberg Press)

Born in Bad Oldesloe, Germany, in 1948. Lives in Berlin, Germany.