Alla inlägg den 14 maj 2009

Av Lars Vilks - 14 maj 2009 19:49

Madelon Vriesendorp (born 1945) is a Dutch artist best known as one of the co-founders of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in the early 1970s (together with her husband Rem Koolhaas and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis).Vriesendorp is, though, the opposite of easy to pin down.


Trying to label her — surrealist artist sculptor, collaborator, mother, householder, host, collector and curator — suggests a boxed-up, product-based view of a creative life which is actually the opposite of the extraordinary critical, hilarious and productive work and environment she generates. Does it even feel like work? "No. It feels like playing around," she says.

Visiting her flat is something special — a short immersion in her world. The flat is filled with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny items, carefully and critically found, bought, made, received, added together, arranged, grouped, perhaps reincorporated into paintings, stories or other objects.

She’s most interested in "cultural mistakes", like a Father Christmas on a cross, things changed by mistranslation. The main collection is formed by the ranks of tiny objects grouped by type — buildings, devils, body parts; objects from the inside of snowdomes; figures from Kinder Eggs made of wax, metal, plastic, paper, stone; and a couple of feathers.



In the biennial Vriesendorp has installed a huge version of the Statue of Liberty. Earlier she has made an animated film about the famous sculpture. A second small object has been placed among the stones close to the Ladonia Bar. It is a sculptural version of Jules Joseph Lefebre’s painting La Verité from 1970. This painting probably inspired the French sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi who presented his first model in the same year. Pictures can be found in New Herald.

Skapa flashcards