Helmut Lang: What remains behind
Curated by Neville Wakefield
MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to present What remains behind by Helmut Lang in the artist's first solo institutional exhibition in Los Angeles at the Schindler House. The historic house designed by fellow Austrian Rudolph Schindler provides the spare, proto-minimalist frame for a series of sculptures that invoke the human body and the memory of its impression upon both the building and the work itself. The intense materiality of the Kings Road house is echoed in a series of freestanding sculptures made of polyurethane foam that has been bound, varnished and hardened into fist-like forms that appear at once ancient and modern. Suffused with deeply personal history and emotional enigma, the dialogue between the soft and the hard, abstraction and figuration, the body and its surroundings echoes across the vacant space. The result is a kind of sonogram for which the visible and the invisible meld to create an abstract trace of the moments at which hard and soft architectures begin and end. As with all of Lang’s work, the visible and the invisible are put in direct play. Stating his preference for materials “with a past, elements with irreplaceable presence and with scars and memories of a former purpose,” Lang impregnates the architecturally hallowed space with the powerful but ghostly presences of collective pasts and unknown futures.
Helmut Lang: What remains behind
February 19, 2025 — May 4, 2025
Related Exhibition
The exhibition is presented with the support of Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello
