The World of Madelon Vriesendorp: Paintings/Postcards/Objects/Games is an exhibition that brings together the Dutch artist’s wildly diverse practices from the past thirty-five years, including painting, drawing, collecting, recycling, sculpture and psychological gamedevising as well as the serious business of collecting what Walter Benjamin once called ‘the trash of history’.
The exhibition, originated at the AA School of Architecture in London and transformed for the Aedes show, underlines Vriesendorps influence within the context of cultural history. Vriesendorp was one of the founding members of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (together with Rem Koolhaas and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis) and a resident teacher at the AA for over a decade. Her painting Flagrant Délit featured on the cover of Koolhaas’ book Delirious New York (1978). Showing the Chrysler and Empire State buildings caught red-handed, in post-coital embrace, by the Rockefeller Center, it constitutes one of the most beguiling attempts to depict the unconscious double-life of Modern architecture. However, there is a significant body of work preceding and following this celebrated period that has remained largely unseen by the public.
The curators of the show, Stephan Trüby and Shumon Basar, gained unique access to Vriesendorp’s extraordinary studio/archive in North London, a private cosmology of found and invented symbols and stories and the symbolic starting point and repository for ‘The World’ of Vriesendorp. The Aedes Gallery installation includes paintings and drawings dating from 1967 to today; two collections of postcards (approx. eight thousand in total) collected by Vriesendorp and Koolhaas in upstate New York during the 1970s, which form an accidental archaeology of the USA; and a rarely seen 1979 animation, Flagrant Délit, co-authored with Teri Wehn-Damisch, which tells the torrid tale of Manhattan’s most infamous skyscrapers as an anthropomorphic surrealist melodrama. Also featured will be Vriesendorp’s astounding ‘Archive’ of miniature objects, models and figurines (numbering in the thousands), which includes an Indian Minnie Mouse in regional dress fraternising with a winged Father Christmas. A special installation is also on show – a life-sized incarnation of the self-penned psychological diagnosis kit, ‘The Mind Game’.
The accompanying Aedes catalogue publishes for the first time Vriesendorp’s and Wehn-Damisch’s storyboard of the 1979 animation, Flagrant Délit: Dream of Liberty. The AA catalogue, edited by Trüby and Basar, includes an introduction by critic and collaborator Charles Jencks, conversations between Vriesendorp and historian Beatriz Colomina and also cult novelist Douglas Coupland, a rumination by Hubert Damisch on Freud’s London house and Vriesendorp’s studio close by, Fenna Haakma Wagenaar on the ‘productivity of distraction’, a photo-essay by Charlie Koolhaas on her mother’s house/studio, and Rem Koolhaas in a frank interview on origins, ambition and privacy, along with other other contributions by Zaha Hadid, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Brett Steele and Zoe Zenghelis.
Press quotes from the London show:
"These are images as pivotal to our memories of the architecture of the city as Piranesi or Metropolis. This show will skew your view of the city in the most delightful way."
Edwin Heathcoate, The Financial Times
"Her work uncovers something incredibly strong and usually undescribed. It's an astonishing collection of suggestive, analytical imagination."
Kester Rattenbury, Building Design
"Vriesendorp has remained in the swim of ideas. As a result, this exhibition feels fresh, and long overdue."
Shumi Bose, The Architect's Journal
Catalogue
An Aedes catalogue was published.
With a text by Stephan Trüby and Shumon Basar
ISBN 978-3-937093-88-8
German/English
Price € 10,-
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