Image courtesy of Taiyo Watanabe.
Join us for the opening reception of Soft Schindler at the Schindler House.
Soft Schindler, curated by Mimi Zeiger, begins with traces of pink paint on redwood—faint evidence of when in late 1949 Pauline Schindler, estranged from her architect husband but living in half of the house they built together, painted her side of the interior salmon pink. To R.M. Schindler, her intolerable act violated a sanctum of modernism and his desire for honest expression of natural materials. This exhibition, however, interprets her act as softening our canonical understanding of house as manifesto—softness as resistance—and yields to plural narratives that lay interpretive ground for contemporary artworks and architectural installations.
The Schindler House has never been a binary. “Both/and” to its core, the house contains nearly a century of fluid, alternating domesticities: dinner parties, political debates, and love affairs. It was the salon of art dealer Galka Scheyer and the stage for clashes with architect Richard Neutra. Archival photographs suggest material legacies in dialogue with Schindler’s rigorous geometries: tablecloths, pillows, curtains, flower pots—ephemeral elements that like the pink paint were not preserved when the residence was restored in the 1990s in approximation of the original intentions of the architect.
Soft Schindler participants, through their respective practices and presented works, show the incompleteness of binary ideas in architecture, sculpture, and design— femininity vs. masculinity, inside vs. outside, heavy vs. light, rational vs. emotional—framing such notions outmoded. Each of these practitioners makes non-conforming aesthetics and ideologies manifest in space.
Related
Exhibition
SOFT SCHINDLER
October 12, 2019 – February 16, 2020
Related
Events
Wednesday, Dec 11, 2019
7-9pm
Saturday, Feb 15, 2020
3-5pm