Emotional Architecture | JAMES CASEBERE in New York
In Emotional Architecture, Casebere will present an entirely new body of work inspired by world-renowned Mexican architect Luis Barragán. The title of the exhibition references the name given to the style of modernist architecture conceived by Barragán and the artist Mathias Goéritz, who, frustrated by the cold functionalism of Modernism, embraced space, color and light to create buildings that engendered warmth, meditation, and reflection.
Courtyard with Orange Wall, 2017 (c) James Casebere
Emotional Architecture
James Casebere
January 27 – March 11, 2017
Sean Kelly Gallery
New York
PR Info _ In Emotional Architecture, Casebere will present an entirely new body of work inspired by world-renowned Mexican architect Luis Barragán. The title of the exhibition references the name given to the style of modernist architecture conceived by Barragán and the artist Mathias Goéritz, who, frustrated by the cold functionalism of Modernism, embraced space, color and light to create buildings that engendered warmth, meditation, and reflection.
In this new body of work, Casebere returns to his career-long interrogation of interior architectural spaces to explore Barragán’s sumptuous use of color, dramatic light and simple haptic, planar surfaces. These new works evoke the serene austerity that inhabited Casebere’s early series of work examining societal power structures through the interrogation of prisons cells. However, the sense of isolation and enforced confinement that defined those works has been replaced with an atmosphere of joy and beauty that characterizes Barragán’s unique oeuvre.
Yellow Passage, 2017 (c) James Casebere
Casebere’s innovative work has established him at the forefront of artists to work with what would become known as constructed photography. His practice over the last four decades reveals the influence of film, architecture, and art history on him, in both the simple and the complex models that he creates in his studio. His table-sized constructions are made of everyday materials, pared down to their essential forms in order to create ambiguous, evocative, and, on occasion, unsettling environments. Devoid of human figures, the resulting images invite viewers to project into and inhabit the spaces he has created, relying on their imagination and memory to fill in the gaps.
Info + illus. courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery
