opening
on february 8th at 6:30pm, in the presence of the artists
opening hours
Free entrance from wednesday to saturday — 1pm to 7pm. and during isdaT opening days march 9th & 10th from 11am to 8pm.
curated by
David Ryan & Benet Spencer
artists
Emmanuelle Castellan, David Coste, Valérie du Chéné, Andrew Grassie, Laurent Proux, Tim Renshaw, David Ryan, Anna Salamon, Katharina Schmidt & Benet Spencer
Phase II — Imagining Architecture is an international exhibition, organized by Cambridge School of Art — Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge, UK) and the institut supérieur des arts de Toulouse (Toulouse, FR). Taking architecture-related works held in the isdaT collection as a starting point, Phase II aims to build a dialogue around these areas, by developing a curated exhibition of contemporary painting, drawing and installation, to be presented alongside works from the existing collection.
To facilitate a re-examination of work from the isdaT historical and artworks collections, from C18th, C19th and C20th, and in relation to the broad theme of the Phase I project, of art-architecture relationships, selected contemporary artists have be invited to respond with their own interventions, through constructing installations or proposing a new work, which sets up a specific dialogue with older work borrowed from the archive. The selected archival works are varied; the exhibition includes painting and drawing, alongside plans and photographic documentation of architectural motifs. Key archival works include a series of drawings from 1872-1877, by the facade architect of École des Beaux-Arts, Toulouse, Pierre Esquié, as well as reproductions of Le Corbusier’s work, selected from L’Architecture vivante, published between 1923-1933 (isdaT collection).
Within each discipline, the media used and mode of production / representation is examined, for example: paintings of pure geometric abstraction are adjacent to a C19th plans of a building and a black and white photographic image of an architectural detail is juxtaposed with a contemporary work representing architectonic space.
In this way, the descriptive language of linear architectural drawing can be considered in relation to the formalist dialogue found within contemporary abstraction. This also points to various questions around time, the contemporary and the archive. A topological approach to time will be in use in the exhibition, whereby works from different periods are seen as points in a field, which are allowed to touch, resonate with, and inform each other.
Phase II — Imagining Architecture is the 2nd stage of the project: Phase I: Painting, Drawing, Architecture. The first exhibition in this project was: Phase I, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, February 2016.
Phase I : Painting, Drawing, Architecture has been developed as part of ‘Réseau Peinture’, an international research network focusing on painting, which is a collaboration between French, UK, German and US art schools. Réseau Peinture was initiated in 2009 by the artist Olivier Gourvil, from the École Supérieure d’Art et Design Grenoble-Valence.
David Ryan is a painter, video artist, and musician. His work explores issues around sound and image, the histories of modernism, and possibilities of cross-disciplinarity. He is Reader in Fine Art at Cambridge School of Art — Anglia Ruskin University.
Benet Spencer is an artist, curator and Course Leader in BA Fine Art at Cambridge School of Art — Anglia Ruskin University. His painting focuses on architecture, which is explored through both iconography and the language of pictorial representation.
archival material includes
- Examens d’architecture – Académie royale de peinture, sculpture and architecture of Toulouse, 1785-1789
- Vedutta de la Salute à Venise, oil painting, Venetian School, C18th
- Plans de l’ancien Couvent de la Daurade, drawings, Toulouse, 1826
- Cours complet des éléments du dessin…, Félix Gaillard, éd. G. Devers, Toulouse, 1844
- Watercolour drawings, Pierre Esquié, 1872-1877
- L’Architecture vivante, Le Corbusier et P. Jeanneret, éd. A. Morancé, 1923-1933
- Photographic documentation, Palais des arts, École des Beaux Arts, Toulouse, 1950.