Metropolis Magazine reviews Pré, the Moma exhibition, running through February 2009, featuring over three hundred digitized watercolors done by Steven Holl over the last three decades. These works originally painted early in the morning, before the daily grind of project-driven deadlines, are playful yet powerfully captivating.
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14 Comments
buddhism?
Not sure i follow, Orhan. Is it in refernce to the title?
i meant the ritual of painting every morning. i thought it was beautiful that sh would take his time religiously every morning and do a watercolor.
artist on kawara would do the same with his date paintings.
Ahh...
That was going to be my second guess.
Oh, man.
*makes mental note to avoid MoMA like the plague*
Why 765, you don't like?
Wow. What a treat, to get to see not only a collection of the awesome watercolors, but also a glimpse of his work space.
I don't ever see myself being an employee again (fingers crossed) but if I worked for anyone I'd want it to be Steven Holl. Everything he does resonates with my personal narrative of what architecture should be.
unfortunately his watercolors look nothing like the real space, which is a shame. his work should stay on paper. see holl's lars muller book "written on water" for evidence of this.
hmm,
a- does these mean sh is also moving into the disposables bin?
or,
b- the show is a messenger that he'll recieve pritzker coin?
A portrait of SH as self-absorbed, detached and irrelevant. Watercolors? Why softly beat us over the head with the automatic-poetic of watercolors? It's bullshit.
...or beautiful, depending on your point-of-view.
if watercolor/sketching is what an obviously talented designer uses to help him think and explore, why would anyone be against it?
The problem with these watercolors is that they lead him to a place that's always in the past . . . a cutting edge past, mind you, circa 1978. These antiquated techniques are the result of SH coming of age in the pastel era of Michael Graves. SH's bent tho, is that he never pandered to Michelangelo or Palladio.
This said, if MG's projects are Toon Town versions of the Laurentian Library, SH's projects are process-identical versions of say, Ronchamp or LaTourette, depending on which side of bed he got out of that day.
SH hides under the teflon blanket of poetry, which diverts attention away from his results. What are the results? Formal, literally hollow, poche-heavy space with interest points of fetish sprinkled throughout. But who cares? Everyone is dumbstruck by the image of SH being at one with the world in beautiful morning light alone with himself and his paints, being an artist.
Go see him lecture sometime. His inarticulate rambling is punctuated with body gestures describing what he can't verbally. Perhaps his work is too great for words? It appears to me that he thinks so.
We're post-Burden, post-Koons, post-Koolhaas, post-Schanbel, post-Koop Himmelblau, post-Barney, hell, even post-Warhol. How can we take this watercolor thing seriously? Onward with art, not backward.
i'm not sure i'm going to like your future of art, thanks. i think there's life in all of the 'post-'s you mention. with what would you propose replacing them?
what holl does is holl's. as much as i like to admire it, what i do and what you do is obviously something different from what he does. luckily, there's room for all of us.
First of all, SW, thanks for not correcting my spelling of Coop Himmelb(l)au. Second of all, you have a good point: what Holl does is Holl's, etc. and there's room for us all.
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