In the framework of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, Fundació Mies van der Rohe and Ana Mas Projects present an intervention by artist Laercio Redondo, which explores History and its multiple narratives. The aim is to create a dialogue with the space itself, raising questions of memory and effacements in time, especially in relation to its construction and later reconstruction.
To Redondo, architectural landmarks such as the Pavilion not only have a history but also tell a story. They are essentially narrative devices, that serve its time (and dominant ideology) by highlighting certain aspects of history while deflecting others. That is why the intervention here is subtle: it seeks to produce almost invisible disruptions in space that magnify such effacements.
The central piece consists of a set of translucid displays, made out of silk, and meticulously distributed along the glass panels. Depicting the few surviving photographs of the original building which served as models for its reconstruction, they confront the viewer with a superimposition of past and present. Offering, thus, a composite perspective on the building and the outside garden.
The artist has also created a set of prints on plywood displayed on supports that use the same kind of travertine stone as the Pavilion’s floor. Appearing at first glance as completely black monochromes, these images depend on the movement of the spectator’s body (and gaze) to reveal themselves in tenuous contrast. A sound piece installed in the garden completes the intervention, offering a multi-layered account on the work of the architect and his collaborator Lilly Reich.
The interest for Mies vas der Rohe is part of Redondo’s long-term artistic research on International and Brazilian Modernism, as seen in previous works such as The Glass House (2008), Memory from Brasilia (2012), Façade (2014) and Detour (2015) among others. Redondo’s varied choice of media in his dialogue with the physical and symbolical structure of the Pavilion is also a nod to the Modernist trope of blurring the contours between painting, sculpture, design, and architecture.
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