Madelon Vriesendorp’s review – a sexualized vision of skyscrapers being painted | Art and design

Meand passengers new York A building with a large window overlooking the Manhattan grid below, the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings are in the same bed. The Chrysler melts into bright silver, shaken, while the lamp on top of the Empire State Building is still bright red and on the bedside table is the arm of the Statue of Liberty with a lamp indicating the desire to come. But no! Lovers are caught up in it. Next door is the RCA Building, which has moved from its usual location at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to see this!

Madelon VriesendorpThe sexual skyscraper painting of 1975 Flagrant Délit – “captured in place” – can be seen twice in her Mind Games exhibition: as a vertical print and as the cover of Delirious New York, a 1978 book by her ex-husband Rem Koolhaas that is a history of the city and new architecture. What exactly is Vriesendorp? An architectural designer? A photographer? He is not just a visionary, and won the 2025 Soane Medal awarded to visionaries who “advance and enrich the understanding of architecture”. Hence the show. And it all started with skyscrapers merging.

In 1975, Vriesendorp founded OMA – Office of Metropolitan Architecture – with Koolhaas and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis. Today, OMA is a leading international management company Euralille and Beverly Hills Prada Store: ultra-urban sublime is OMA’s forte, even if it doesn’t feel right when you’re waiting for the train in Lille. Back in the 1970s, when all this was a dream, OMA created attractive, unstructured works and Vriesendorp’s paintings gave their strange, strange visions a humorous form. In some of his sex dreams, Manhattan itself is a floating bed between skyscrapers that are half ready to enter a post-coital apocalyptic reverie.

The paintings and drawings of New York that dominate the first part of the exhibition clearly express the idea of ​​Delirious New York, which says that the chaos of Manhattan, the powerful development of capitalism in the 20th century created beautiful, lovely, emotionally satisfying buildings than cold intellectual ideas. Le Corbusier. European modernists tried to punish the future but the pirates of New York built buildings as modern as mockery and as rich as old buildings, attracting attention. Vriesendorp cartoons enjoy it. The Statue of Liberty sits sad and naked on the bed among the modern pieces, while elsewhere the Chrysler and the Empire State are on the bed again, this time undisturbed.

However, although all skyscrapers are very good, that was then and this is now. Today’s has left a lot of money to clean up as the weather slows down. In the second part of the exhibition, the latest creations by Vriesendorp show a positive, smart approach to climate issues in art made from recycled materials. Egg cartons become monster masks and plastic milk bottles become dragons.

In another space adjacent to Soane’s museum, he creates a surreal Freudian table out of cardboard. Two people sit at a table playing a game in which they have to move “symbolic objects” around a model room while around them are large arrays of similar colors, including a striped snake and a patchwork dog. It’s a mind game that he likes to play with strangers and friends.

But the comparison with the early surrealists is unfortunate. Vriesendorp’s art is too free to touch the unconscious, and too intelligent to grasp the absurd. Sometimes, you can hear the secret jokes between the architects – if you haven’t read Delirious New York, you might be out of touch with all the high-rises. And it’s very interesting that he created a book with a postmodernist guru Charles Jencksor has worked with a member of the Turner-winning urban regeneration outfit Collect?

However, there is no visit to the magical museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields which was destroyed. The vision of architecture Vriesendorp has shown all rejects the straight lines of purist modernism building styles that are happy with ideas and nonsense, because we are not simple creatures and we need our unusual sides to be shown by buildings. John Soane fought a similar battle: working in the Georgian era at the height of neoclassicism, with its straight and clear columns, he twisted this style into a melancholic poem. When he built the great new Bank of England, he not only modeled it after the old Roman church but sent a picture of what it would look like in the ruins of the future.

Vriesendorp’s luxury apartments fit into Soane’s picturesque surroundings. His show is a fascinating contemporary footnote to his dark past.